


Obedience Is Bliss (Don't Fight It)

by Zaniida



Series: POI AU-Verse Fics [3]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Bonding, Dom Harold Finch, Dom/sub, Episode: s01e10 Number Crunch, Integrity, M/M, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Sexual Submission, Some Swearing, Sub John Reese, Suicide by Cop (discussed), if you see anything that ought to be marked please tell me in the comments, safe house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-01 19:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15150050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaniida/pseuds/Zaniida
Summary: Dom/sub verse where the attack in Number Crunch plays out a little differently… and multiple people have to come to grips with the idea of John as an unusual sort of sub.





	1. Snow Job

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesireeArmfeldt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/gifts).
  * Inspired by [if I had a heart I would sing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6492784) by [parpar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/parpar/pseuds/parpar). 
  * Inspired by [i heard the truth was built to bend](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5698684) by [illuminatedcities](https://archiveofourown.org/users/illuminatedcities/pseuds/illuminatedcities). 
  * Inspired by [Dangerous If Unbound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1206946) by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). 
  * Inspired by [Peak Effect](https://archiveofourown.org/works/676020) by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). 

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agent Snow explains John's nature to Carter, attempting to convince her that it's safest to bring him in.

“He’s an incredibly powerful, incredibly _gifted_ submissive,” Agent Snow stressed, and Carter’s understanding of The Man in the Suit spun around on its axis as she tried to cope with that idea.

Closing her eyes, she pulled up every moment, however brief—any point of communication between them. Before even meeting him, she’d seen him fight. A sub—the stronger subs, at least—might fight defensively, protecting a child or someone equally as vulnerable, but… he’d been alone, protecting a half-empty bottle of whiskey. And he was clearly trained; she’d guessed special forces, which these agents confirmed by their interest alone, but that was when she’d thought he was a dom. She’d never heard of the military accepting subs in anything more than a support role. Medics, transport, pencil pushers… not combat.

And why hadn’t he just let the punks take the booze? Subs didn’t react to confrontation by fighting back like that, not instinctively—and the man had been running on instinct, not judgment, as evidenced by his reaction just after winning that encounter.

After a fight like that, it was a little surprising that he’d just surrendered to the police, but she’d judged that to be a sign of exhaustion, not just physical but psychological. Calm, resigned… like he didn’t have any fucks left to give.

But he hadn’t been the least bit submissive once she’d started questioning him. Wouldn’t answer her when she asked about military service; deflected a name request with philosophy. Asked if he was in trouble, but stayed silent as she tried to determine if he was in need of help, or on some mission of self-destruction… and she still wasn’t sure of the answer.

Subs didn’t wiggle out of questions the way he had, not unless they were under direct orders, or scared of a higher dominant, like Mrs. Kovach had been. Yet the homeless guy who’d just beaten up Anton’s little pack of punks had never come across as scared or controlled.

That first short encounter hadn’t eliminated the possibility that he was a flatliner, but his later activities were pretty clear on that matter: What kind of flatliner could so consistently overpower doms without killing them? And though she had begun to suspect that he had some partner in crime, that partner wasn’t on the ground with him; nobody ever described him in the plural or mentioned any second party at all. He ran his missions like a one-man army; she’d never suspected that he had a handler. That he _needed_ a handler.

The Man in the Suit… a sub? The whole idea seemed utterly laughable. She recalled the times she’d suggested that he turn himself in, and how he’d shrugged off the idea with a quip or tangential reassurance. If she’d even suspected that he could be a sub, she’d’ve tried a flat command, though she doubted it would’ve done any better. How could a submissive possibly react to a law enforcement officer the way that man had reacted to her?

Submissives were the bastions of social order. In police encounters they were only ever victims or coerced participants; the incidence of criminal subs was so low that the law had started assuming their innocence centuries before it was normal to assume the innocence of flatliners or doms. Even the legal burden of proof was lighter when a submissive claimed to be a victim; society still assumed that most doms could fight back, while subs usually couldn’t, and a sub lying to get an innocent person in trouble was practically unheard of.

A submissive rebel? A vigilante? It went against everything she knew of them, right down to the biological level they’d studied in high school, or the psych classes she’d taken in college. The reward centers of their brains, the activation and inhibition systems, were rooted in different core behaviors. Resisting orders was pleasurable, for the doms, but difficult and painful for the subs. So a dom who got too fixated on resistance created a pleasure loop in the brain, an unyielding mental state that it was hard to break loose from—hence their reputation for being bull-headed. But a sub could easily fall into a state of _relax and obey_ : subspace, the natural bliss of being properly lined up with the world around you.

It was hardly surprising, then, that subs followed orders, abided by laws, were happiest when the rules were clear and reasonable and obvious and they didn’t have to try to figure out the edge cases or boundaries. Unclear rules, or unspoken expectations that clashed with the written rules, didn’t much bother doms, but they were inherently stressful to subs, as was any sustained opposition to the social order.

Evidently, The Man in the Suit had gotten used to that particular stressor.

“Submissives need leadership,” Snow was saying, and that, too, seemed obvious. “They’re always looking for someone to cling to, to surrender to—someone to trust. But John’s paranoia makes trust impossible, and that leaves him in a constant state of instability.”

“I don’t understand,” she protested, even as she filed away his name, for as little good as a name that common might do her. “He’s one of the most skilled agents I’ve ever seen. But submissives stay in support roles, don’t they? They’re not allowed in the field.”

“Under normal circumstances, that’s true,” Evans confirmed. “It would be foolish to entrust sensitive information or missions to submissives, not when they might get captured and interrogated, forced to turn against their own side. That’s why submissives were never subject to the Draft.”

“But there are some like John,” Snow added, “who are strong enough to resist most orders even without training. And with specialized training, they’re some of our most talented agents. Highly perceptive, like most subs, able to pick up on the intentions and emotions of others—but also able to disguise their own, a key asset during covert operations. They’re incredibly strong-willed and resistant to pain, nearly incapable of being coerced—far more durable than any flatliner, or even most doms. With proper handlers, with partners who know how to support a submissive in the field, they’re capable of small-team covert operations that we could never pull off with dominants alone.”

“Wait, you… you _train_ them to resist orders?”

“Doesn’t sound much like the military, does it?” Snow said, a slight amusement to his eyes, though it didn’t touch his lips or his voice. “But you’re thinking from a dominant point of view. The point of training is to break the instincts and habits that would get you killed during combat, and to establish new ones that keep you alive and let you work with the group, work as a unit to accomplish goals. Dominant instincts make it hard to accept those in power over you; we break them of that, get them to appreciate the hierarchy, to stop thinking of themselves first.

“Submissives already _have_ that. What they need to learn is when and how to ignore an order, or to work around it, or to let a superior order take precedence. To avoid falling into subspace. That’s what the special ops training gives them, if they’re strong enough to merit inclusion in the program.”

“The problem is,” Evans interjected, “most of the subs who qualify in terms of strength are also psychologically unstable. We’ve discovered that these types of submissives almost uniformly come from abusive backgrounds. Their ability to resist orders is built up as a survival tactic.”

“What do you mean, a survival tactic?”

Snow lowered his head, staring her straight in the eyes. “A submissive who’s given abusive commands generally obeys them—even if they’re harmful. They’ll go without food, or stand barefoot in the snow; they’ll obey orders to hide their own injuries, because it’s in their nature to obey, especially when they’re young. That’s why so many subs die young, of preventable causes.”

Being in law enforcement, Carter was all too familiar with the people who fell through the cracks; she dealt with the aftermath, when it was too late to help the victims anymore. Submissives were so easy to take advantage of that modern society had developed safeguards: regular home inspections, extra supervision in school; workplace advocates, not just for teens but even up into their twenties and thirties. But there were still tragic incidents of subs dying from abuse, neglect, or safety violations; subs found it incredibly difficult to assert boundaries on their own behalf.

“But some small percentage of them fight back,” Snow was saying, “by learning how to rebel. Not in big ways—they’re not usually strong enough for that, at the start—but in small ways. If they were told that they couldn’t eat dinner that night, they’ll sneak out for a snack right after midnight. If they were told to stay out in the snow, they’ll pull a doormat over to keep their feet from freezing. They learn to do what it takes to survive. By the time they find their way to us, they’re already well on their way to becoming full-fledged switches.”

Another term she’d never heard before. “Switches?”

“Subs who can masquerade as doms—who can actually push orders on other people.”

“Their core identity is still submissive,” Evans interjected. “They still need support, still seek out connection to a worthy dom. It centers them. But they’re capable of a mix of traits that we’ve never seen in anyone else—anyone who hasn’t grown up in an unstable, abusive environment. They’re able to push orders and resist orders like a dom, but sense emotions and intentions like a sub. They’re better than either dynamic at hiding their own intentions, and far more adaptable; they’re artists at disguise, at infiltration.”

It seemed… absurd. Telling doms and subs apart was easy; just get a strong dom to push a distasteful order. Subs would do it without hesitation; most doms, if caught off guard, would fight it, and the strongest doms would end up in a power struggle. Key business meetings often started with a command to leave the room, which subs obeyed and doms ignored; imagine if a hidden sub remained, capable of discerning the intentions of those in attendance, an advantage that would surely be illegal if anyone thought that such a move was even _possible_. Or imagine a vulnerable group of subs at the mercy of the one sub who could push his will on them, with none of the defenders realizing that the danger came from the _inside_. A rogue sub.

John was a _rogue sub_. It shouldn’t be _possible_.

“Normal subs shy away from combat,” Snow added. “It’s difficult to get them to even take defensive training; they don’t like the thought of hurting others. Violence is inherently repulsive. But a switch can pick up fighting skills, and go toe to toe with doms during training drills. And where a sub might be _forced_ to kill, a switch is the only type of sub we’ve discovered who can _choose_ to kill, who can decide that it’s _necessary_. They can kill with minimal hesitation and no evident trauma.”

“Which is a vital skill when it comes to defending your country,” Evans allowed. “But it’s considerably less beneficial when it’s turned against our own citizens, with no obvious direction. He’s taking people out, and we don’t know why. What his criteria is. That’s why we need to stop him.”

 

At her desk, that night, getting ready to call it a day, Carter still hadn’t come to any conclusions. They’d tried to impress upon her just how dangerous he was, and how valuable; they’d tried to creep her out with the idea that he’d somehow fixated on her, comparing that trust to John’s trust for the handler he’d apparently killed.

 _They were a team. Inseparable. She provided him with that grounding influence that every sub needs to stay stable. And yet—he killed her_.

It had made her stomach curl, the thought of a sub getting so twisted that he’d actually, without any orders, kill a dom, let alone _his_ dom. Of course, it left her wondering if all that military training had actually been a net benefit for John; without it, what might he have become? The CIA seemed to value switches, to seek them out, only to put them to use in the kind of missions that Carter was glad she’d never been a part of. The kind she wished she didn’t know about.

 _We thought he was dead. You ran his prints… brought him back from the dead_.

 _We want to bring him back in before he kills anyone else. Before he kills himself_.

 _We want to help him_.

Bringing him back probably wasn’t ‘helping’ him. John was a rogue element in her city, and she wasn’t about to let him continue with his crusade, but… he seemed to be trying to do good, to pick up the slack where he saw the legal methods falling short. And her own experience with the murky moral soup of the military told her that John’s moral compass had been calibrated by something other than the CIA. The thought of turning him back over to their care made her skin crawl.

But one point they’d made seemed to be correct: John trusted her. He hadn’t been willing to turn himself over, not yet, but he’d sent multiple people her way, as though she was the one person he trusted to do her job, and to care about getting it right.

Made her wonder, sometimes, if he was keeping tabs on her somehow. Made her feel like she was being watched.

 _He’s always looking for someone to trust_.

Because what submissive could make it through life on their own? Even if John was capable of masquerading as a dom, he still had that submissive core, the same needs as any other sub. Without that stability, a submissive was… lost.

 _We want you to keep yourself, and him, alive_.

She recalled the dull, exhausted eyes of the man when she’d first met him, and wondered if they were the eyes of a man a few steps from suicide. If she _didn’t_ help bring him in… would she be signing his death warrant? His seemingly one-man crusade wasn’t a safe one.

 _I don’t think you killed those guys. But I think you know who did_.

 _Every killer I locked up thought they had a good reason_.

Carter rubbed her temples, caught between two difficult choices; she couldn’t decide which was the right choice, or even if there _was_ a right choice in this case. John had killed for his country, just as she had, but that didn’t make him a killer. And she couldn’t help thinking that Agent Snow was trying to, well, _snow her_ with disinformation somehow. There was something about him that she didn’t want to trust.

 _I was his best friend. We want to help him_.

If she asked John directly, would he confirm Snow’s claim? Deny it? Refuse to answer?

One of her first pieces of evidence on John was his second encounter with the O’Maras: He’d shot them with their own merchandise, and made off with a worrisome assortment of guns. She wasn’t even sure of the details, because the O’Maras were hesitant to make honest claims about the theft, given that they shouldn’t have had that kind of weaponry in New York City to begin with. Or, at least, she’d picked up that detail from context and her previous encounters with Seamus O’Mara. So John had gotten his hands on a lot of unregistered weapons.

And yet, he hadn’t put them to use. Most of them. Someone had shot a grenade launcher at a van, and she’d suspected, in hindsight, that it had been John, though she didn’t know the reason. And he’d blown open a garage to get at Hector Alvarez, but… John seemed determined to avoid bloodshed wherever possible. She wasn’t prepared to say just where the lines were drawn; dead bounty hunter shot in the side in that hotel, but he’d had a gun out and she could guess that he’d been threatening innocents at the time, even if no one came forward to discuss it. That KGB guy in the park, shot to kill, but it was hard to fault John for that kind of decision when facing a man that dangerous. Whenever possible, John shot to wound, not to kill.

She was still on the fence when her phone rang, startling her. And then she was talking with the man himself.

During the brief exchange, she had to resist the urge to check—to test his resistance to an outright command. The kind of thing you didn’t say to strangers these days; everything was phrased so obliquely, to avoid inadvertently compelling or giving offense.

Before he hung up, she blurted out her gratitude. And then sat there, staring at the phone, trying to figure out if gratitude lined up with turning him in, or letting him go.

She was a cop. Following the law was her job. It was difficult to be a good cop, because following the rules hit against that dom part of your brain, but she _was_ a good cop, because she had put effort into learning how to control her instincts. A lot of cops didn’t bother.

John had learned to control his instincts. They had that point of commonality; maybe it was part of what had drawn him to her.

The obvious path was to bring him in. But still, she hesitated.

But not for long. Because it was evident that, no matter how skilled John might be, there was only one end in sight: eventually, John was going to wind up dead. And he might take down a lot of innocent people when he fell.

She picked up the phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Adviso:** I thought the main page said midnight EDT (9 PM PDT). It is only 3 PM PDT, and the fics have already gone live? I am disappoint. However, I hope to have a chapter update at the end within the next few hours here. So if the ending seems a bit off, that's why.
> 
> Sigh.
> 
> ETA: Have added the final chapter. It's somewhat rushed, because I ran out of time, hence more summary and less direct interaction than I would like, but it completes the tale and it came in about two hours under the deadline I _thought_ I had.
> 
> I'm currently considering whether to go through this again (say in a month or so) and fix it up to be fully what I want it to be. That's a possibility, at least. Stay tuned!
> 
> * * *
> 
> The idea of a switch being created by an abusive childhood comes from the series _Lie to Me_. The idea is that growing up in an abusive household makes you hyper-aware of the abuser's emotional state, as a survival tactic, and thus you can get really good at intuitively spotting emotions in other people. I just adapted the idea to a dom/sub verse.


	2. Snare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John gets dosed with a drug designed to ramp up his submissive response, and all he can think of is to escape while trying to convince Harold not to risk the rescue.

It always felt a little weird, coming down off the high of an active case—more so when they’d lost some of the numbers, and John was left fighting back the urge to crawl back to his dom and beg forgiveness for his abject failure. Of course, it was a false guilt, since he had thrown his best work into the case, even recognized that he couldn’t do it alone and thus enlisted Fusco and convinced even Harold to get out in the field; every change he could think of, every detail he could have done differently relied on knowledge that he hadn’t had at the time. But that knowledge made little difference to his instincts.

Nor did the fact that he didn’t, technically speaking, _have_ a dom.

Human cultures may have shifted tremendously in just the past few decades, but biological instincts didn’t change so readily; these days, a sub could live life on their own terms, never bonding with a dom in the first place, but they’d still be miserable about it half the time. The approval of good friends, even flatliners, could go a long way toward placating his brain, alleviating that burden… but it had been a long time since he’d had anyone that he could term a _friend_. At the moment, his circle of acquaintances basically boiled down to Lionel (minion), Zoe (fuck buddy, and they were both content with that), and… Finch. His boss, and a dom, which his limbic system took as “close enough.”

Of course, John was well equipped to deal with the kind of urges he felt toward Harold. Basic training had rooted out that habit of opening up for a bond; John didn’t seek them out, didn’t try to show throat to any dom who was prominent in his life and of worthy character and not already bonded. Military subs needed that kind of grounding, yearned for it even more strongly than regular subs did, but they were trained to get that from their handlers, and those bonds only went so far. Independence was vital in the kind of missions they got sent on.

That didn’t mean that he didn’t want it. Simply that he knew that his desires didn’t always line up with reality, and he had been trained to separate his desires from his behavior. He was good at that.

He wouldn’t return to Finch with a clean conscience, but he could at least refrain from throwing himself at the dom’s feet and begging for another chance. By now, it was pretty clear that he’d have to turn into some sort of remorseless terrorist to get Finch to stop giving him second chances. As he walked to his car, he let himself bask in that knowledge, that he was at least acceptable enough that his dom wouldn’t throw him away.

Behind him, a vehicle roared up the ramp. The engine sounded heavy, loud, and deep… a van. Not Carter’s squad car or personal car. It was possible that she’d taken a different vehicle, or that it was someone unrelated to the case (at nine PM? on the top floor of the parking structure, even though the place was practically empty? not likely).

When John turned back to look, he saw two people getting out of the van. Felt that instinctive tug at the core of his being: _There he is. He’s your dom. Go to him. Obey him._

He stared at Mark Snow, his handler of only a few months ago, and marveled at how weak the connection had become. Still compelling, yes, but that was probably because he’d let himself get into that after-mission mindset just now, that instinctual need for connection; their work-bond was dull from the time apart, frayed almost to the breaking point because of the betrayal. All the trust built up between them: gone.

Any dom could issue a command, and that would be enough to snare most subs… but for a switch as powerful as John, it took a core layer of trust to trigger that instinctive response. And he’d never trust Mark that way again.

The last order Mark had ever given him had been for him to kill his partner. Mark had claimed that she was a traitor, and John had trusted him enough that he hadn’t even questioned it until it was too late. How could he have strayed so far from the rhythm they’d set up—Kara questioning the suspects, John reading their reactions (regardless of their actual answers)—that he’d taken her guilt on faith? Let Mark’s assertion so fray their connection that he could _do_ that to her?

Kara had died in his arms, burbling her last words through blood: _Don’t trust him. He played us._ In those final moments of her life— _far_ too late—John had been able to sense her sincerity. Kara wasn’t a traitor. And though he couldn’t call her innocent (no one in their unit was innocent), he still had her blood on his hands.

In hindsight, the rationale was obvious: A switch could be trusted to keep a secret; Kara was a higher risk than John was. Mark had expected him to kill her and come back, ready for the next mission—somehow not grasping the kind of turmoil that he’d thrown John into, by breaking his connection to his dom and destroying that foundation of trust, undoing years of conditioning.

Mark had never expected him to run.

His own handler had tricked him into killing his dom. Worse, it had been on a mission that he had tried to opt out of, should never have been on in the first place. The mission that had kept him from Jessica, right when she needed him.

 _Go to him. Trust him. Obey him_.

He stood where he was.

“Hello, John,” Mark said, and John held his ground against the tidal forces that tried to pull him in. It wasn’t even a command, not yet, just the awareness of their connection. He’d known that they’d be coming for him; even before the subway, before his prints got run, he’d known that it was only a matter of time before they tracked him down. Before they got him back.

It was inevitable, but he didn’t have to make it easy for them.

“Mark,” he said, simply, because acknowledging the connection took a little of the tension away. Keeping your defenses strong meant knowing when to give in, just a little, so you could better hold your ground for the important parts.

“It’s been a while,” Mark said. “Are you ready to get back to work?”

The command—the dom’s clear desire—was implied, and John stood firm against the pressure pulsing in his head, in his gut. He glanced at Carter, took in her worried eyebrows, the undercurrent of guilt beneath her mixed emotions. Her Glock was in her holster, her cuffs still on her belt; she didn’t consider him a threat, not yet.

What story had they told her, to get her to cooperate with this? Whatever it was, he couldn’t risk trying to set the record straight. Even if he’d been willing to discuss matters of national security with her, even if he could push past the mental blocks that kept those secrets safe, the exchange could only make things worse, for both of them. If Mark had been willing to kill Kara to protect these secrets, then he’d surely be willing to kill Carter. And if John let on the extent to which he’d broken the conditioning… well, whether he got captured tonight or not, Mark knowing that was never going to be a good thing.

When John didn’t reply, Mark tilted his head, and John picked up his surprise. Did he really think it would be this easy to reclaim the sub he’d betrayed? “Time to come home, John,” Mark said. “Your country still needs you.”

“That’s not going to happen,” John replied calmly, his voice conveying the kind of firm self-confidence that was beyond most subs.

The sudden blow to the side of his thigh nearly dropped him, but he kept his footing—painfully—and took in the sound of the gunshot as he realized, a beat too late, that Mark wasn’t alone. He’d been so focused on resisting his former handler that he’d missed the other guy sneaking around behind the parked cars. And his inattention had left him in a bad place, open to attack from both sides.

As he drew his SIG and turned to meet the attack, his knee twisted and nearly dropped him a second time. The pain wasn’t that intense, despite the injury, but it pulled in enough of his focus that when Snow barked out “ _Stand down, John!_ ” he hesitated, forced to divide his attention among pain and threats and orders all at once.

It wasn’t much of a hesitation, but those few crucial seconds let Snow’s partner rush in close, and before John had quite cleared his head he felt a sudden sting in the back of his shoulder.

His hand-to-hand training kicked in and he had the guy on the ground and unconscious in seconds; guy wasn’t a melee fighter, not by a long shot. But as John was diving behind the car, out of Snow’s line of sight, the scent made his stomach clench tight.

 _Hypomethylin_.

It was one of the drugs they used while training special-ops submissives; he’d been through several rounds of it, early in the regimen. Ramped up the submissive response while they planted subconscious triggers; ensured that he wouldn’t resist them, so the triggers dug in _deep_. He didn’t even want to think about the last time he’d been on it—the things they had forced him to do while he wasn’t able to resist the commands.

A shot like this—intramuscular, like a tranq—he had fifteen minutes before it worked its way to his brain, another forty before it hit peak and he’d be cheerfully following any order given to him by _anyone_.

Fifteen minutes to get out of there. Fifteen minutes to hide.

Barely seconds after he’d taken the guy out, he was taking shots at the van, forcing Snow back and getting rid of both headlights—it was dark enough, now, that the lack of light was decent cover. And it was as much cover as he was likely to get; he took another couple of shots as he retreated, not toward his car (too much of a target), but back toward the stairs.

As the door closed behind him and he started limping his way down as fast as he could force his body to move, he was grateful for one blessing: the feel of Carter’s caution, once he’d started shooting. She was prone to wading in; he hadn’t delayed her long, but his leg was weak enough that he needed the extra time. Didn’t want her bringing him down—didn’t want that on her conscience.

 

As soon as he was down a flight, where his voice wouldn’t carry back to Snow, John triggered his earpiece. “Hey, Harold?” he said, trying to inject a little more calm into those words than he felt.

“John,” Finch’s voice came in immediately, worried. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

“You have to go,” he said, no time for preambles. “Leave the state. Leave the country. Burn your identities—all of them. They’re not safe.”

“Where are you?” Finch said, as if John hadn’t said a word.

“Parking structure—trying to evade capture,” John said, surprised by his honesty; the drugs weren’t kicking in _that_ quickly. “It’s not looking good.” He was almost going to go further— _they’re going to get me_ —when Finch cut him off.

“Carter sold you out. They got to her.”

“Yeah,” John breathed, wincing at the weight on his injured leg. “They’re clever like that.” He was starting to pant, now, just trying to push through the pain and keep moving. Surrender was easy, was natural—was something he was trained to fight against, and he wasn’t about to give up when Finch’s safety was on the line. “I can’t buy you much time,” he said. “I’ll do what I can.” Run. Hide. Fight, if need be. He wasn’t sure if he would kill, wouldn’t know that until the moment he was cornered, the moment he had them at gunpoint… but if it meant a few more minutes for Finch to get away—

“It’s not over, John,” Finch said firmly. “I’m close. Just get to the ground floor.” The strength of the unthinking command buoyed him up a little, made the next few steps not so painful—until he realized what it meant, that Finch was heading closer instead of away.

“ _No_ ,” he growled, hoping some level of command or desperation made it across the phone. It seemed unlikely, given the strength of will he knew that Finch had. “You stay away. Don’t even risk it. Just—just leave me. When they catch me, they’re gonna get into all your secrets; nothing’s safe anymore. Nothing you shared with me.”

Across the comm, barely audible, an engine sped up. Damn it. Finch wasn’t turning away.

Finch wouldn’t abandon him. And part of that was not wanting to let his secrets get compromised, to have to give up on the numbers and go into hiding again; some months ago, that might have been all there was to it. But, over time, the cautious suspicion they’d started with had started to wear away, and, by now, it was impossible to miss the friendship that had been blossoming between them. The affection Harold held for him, above and beyond his ability to work the cases. Harold wouldn’t abandon him, because Harold valued him as a person, in a way that Snow and Kara never had.

He knew all that, but it still hurt. Because when he got caught—there was hardly an _if_ about it anymore; he could hear footsteps on the stairs above him—it was going to bring _Harold_ down, too. Just a short delay, a little exchange of gunfire, and pretty soon he’d be under thrall again; Snow might even force him to bring Harold in himself.

And he’d do it with a blissed-out smile on his face.

Which meant the only option, now—the _only_ option, with Finch rushing to the rescue like a white knight about to get in over his head—was for John to get to him first. To get there in time for them to get away.

And if he wasn’t fast enough… then it was all about to end. For both of them.

“I wanted to say thank you, Harold,” he said, voice tight. “For giving me a second chance. If it all ends tonight—”

“I don’t want you thinking like that, John. Not before we’re captured, and maybe not even then. It’ll make you give up more easily. It’ll make you sloppy.” Again, Finch’s intent floated John along, helped him to keep moving despite the throbbing pain in his leg, the way that his instincts were telling him to stop and curl up and hide. “Keep moving,” Finch said, and John followed the command.

John pushed through the door to the ground floor of the parking structure, instinctively cataloging exits and possible hiding places, concrete barriers that could act as cover in a firefight. He didn’t have to think about it; that much came readily to subs with even a little bit of combat training. Defensive strategies and escape routes were harder for doms to focus on, so they required greater training to know to look for them. It was part of the reason that a dom-sub team worked so well in the field: Each focused on their own strengths and natural inclinations.

In the distance, he heard the roar of a speeding engine, and allowed himself the tiniest smile, bleeding through the exhaustion. Finch driving to the rescue. But before the car was even in sight, he heard the door open behind him.

“Hold it!”

John turned, forcing himself to stay calm, to not meet this as the kind of threat that could turn him lethal again. But Carter was holding him at gunpoint, and it would’ve been clear to a sub of any strength that she had no intention of letting him go.

“Weapons down, John,” she said firmly, and he felt the strength of that command set him swaying just a little on his feet. Maybe he’d mistimed the drugs taking effect; maybe they’d reached the bloodstream a bit early. Maybe it was just that he had let himself think of her as an ally, enough to establish the tiniest edge of a bond before they’d even gotten a chance to know each other. Carter, though, had evidently been told of John’s submissive nature, because the character of her commands was pitched in a way you just didn’t talk to other doms.

That was maybe going to be a pain. Her knowing that. If it even mattered anymore.

He didn’t put his gun down, but he didn’t reach to draw it, either. That kind of move could’ve been suicidal. He hoped that maybe Carter would think her commands held greater sway over him than they did.

“We’re taking you in, John,” Carter said, and John heard Finch’s quick intake of breath across the airwaves; he was hearing this too. Maybe he’d take it as a sign to stay away—though John doubted it. “You need help,” Carter continued. “Agent Snow told me—”

John chuckled, with an edge of despair to the laugh. “I’ll bet he did.”

Finch’s car roared in behind him, and came to a halt just behind John. As he heard the door open, John breathed in the thought of Finch’s foolish courage, coming into this place when he knew Carter was already there. When the likeliest scenario was capture, and the second likeliest was death.

John tried to position himself between Carter and Finch, but not fast enough that Carter couldn’t catch sight of him.

“You!” she gasped.

A moment’s hesitation, and then Finch said, firmly, “I’m here to take John with me, Detective Carter. Before it’s too late.”

“Are you his dom, then?”

Finch’s stiff intake of breath spoke volumes about his feelings on that issue—John knew that he didn’t care to be in charge of anyone, not like that. It was hard not to feel disappointed. “I’m not his master _or_ his keeper, Detective,” Finch said. “I am his _partner_ , and I have no intention of allowing him to fall back into the hands of the agency that so abused him.”

John closed his eyes; the fact that a dom was protecting him, and at such _cost_ , was like a shot of heroin straight to his brain. He tried to fight back the feeling that everything was going to be all right now, because it _wasn’t_ going to be all right, not unless they could get out of there before Mark caught up with them—not unless they could persuade Carter to set them free.

And Carter wasn’t budging.

John lowered his head, staring Carter straight in the eyes. “You ever see a sub on hypomethylin, Carter? They put me on it a dozen times during training. Had to implant the kind of triggers that’ll keep us from spilling state secrets—and with subs like me, they can’t do that without putting us off our guard.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it do?” At this point, she was obviously just trying to stall; her gun wasn’t wavering. John was just glad that her finger wasn’t on the trigger yet.

“Ramps up the subspace response. You think a sub’s a pushover normally? Wait until you see what this stuff does to me. At its peak, I’ll do anything they ask of me. Won’t even try to fight it. I’ll shoot _him_ , if they tell me to. Shoot _you_. I’d be following orders; it’d make me happy to do it.”

Carter’s eyebrows shot up, her face a mask of horror at the idea. John decided to twist the knife.

“So if you still intend to stop me,” he said, “then just shoot me in the head. Say I had a weapon; say you had no choice. I can pull my gun out if it’s easier for you. Just… don’t let them take me back. Not like this. Please,” he breathed, dropping his gaze, not even sure if he was playing her or not, this time.


	3. Emergency Protocols

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold is no slouch when it comes to preparing for emergencies.

The moment of nothing but their shared breaths—his and hers and Harold’s—was an unexpected torment. John resisted looking up to see her face, to try to work out what she was thinking; he could feel the confusion, the mixed emotions, even without direct line of sight, but he couldn’t pick out an edge for either plan of action. Either she’d let them go, or she’d still try to capture him. Or delay them long enough for Snow to catch up with them, which amounted to the same thing. He couldn’t see himself killing her, not even to save Finch, and it wasn’t simply that Finch would be horrified at the exchange. Maybe he could knock her out, if he had to, but it was hard to even think in that direction right now.

Finally—it could only have been a few seconds—there was a shift in Carter’s stance; John didn’t have to look up to know that she was tucking her Glock away. Striding forward, she said crisply, “Let’s get him out of here.” Typical dom, relegating the sub to a passive participant while the doms did their thing; it took a lot of conscious effort to avoid that kind of dominizing behavior, and Carter’s focus was understandably elsewhere. “Come on.”

He didn’t fight when she all but shoved him into the back seat; he needed to get out of there fast more than he needed to maintain his resistance protocols. Even when Finch was back in the driver’s seat, John didn’t feel anything like relief, not until the car was in gear, moving—and, even then, it was a watered-down sort of relief, because they were still in danger. If Snow got down here fast enough—in time to chase them, or even just to catch the license plate, the description of the car, enough to hunt them down….

But Finch was just as aware of the danger; he roared off before John had even gotten his seat belt on—John checked quickly and was relieved to see that Finch, at least, was wearing one. And he was driving faster than John would have expected… fast enough for the cops to notice. Not good.

“Better not get pulled over,” John said, “or I’ll start telling cops the truth without even meaning to.”

“There’s aren’t any cops, Mr. Reese,” Finch asserted, cutting a dizzying path of evasion through the night-crowded streets. “I triggered an emergency protocol that redirects police activity to a dozen false alarms spread across the far side of the city. And my GPS is keeping track of any stragglers that might intersect our route. It should give us enough time to get this done.”

“Maybe five more minutes before this stuff really starts to kick in,” John said, trying to ignore the throb of his leg as he kept pressure on the wound. “Hope whatever you’ve got planned is fast.”

“Is there any direct danger to either of us?” Finch asked, eyes meeting John’s in the mirror for not even a second before they were back on the road. “You’ll have to go over the effects with me, but—”

“Not directly,” John said. “But I’m not going to be much use to you after it does. I’ll follow any command, even an _implied_ command, but you’ve actually got to command me; other than that, I’m gonna fall straight into subspace, probably not surface for a good eight hours. Lingering effects for eighteen, back in training, but I wouldn’t doubt they used a longer dose on me if it exists.”

“Would it be best to sleep it off, then? Or are there complications? I’m not sure how quickly I could secure anything to help you.”

“Won’t really be able to sleep, not until it’s out of my system. Keeps me alert and responsive, focused; that’s the _point_.”

“I see,” Finch said tightly, frowning as he turned another corner.

“You can just dump me in a safe house,” John said. “I know you’ve got some place set up as a jail cell or quarantine; if you just leave me there for a day and a half, lock me up tight, I should be fine.”

“You very likely would be,” Finch allowed. “That doesn’t mean I’m about to leave you alone in such a vulnerable state. We’ll simply hole up together until this is over; the safe house I’ve chosen is well equipped to handle up to three months, if necessary, so a day or two shouldn’t even be an issue.”

“The numbers—” John started, but then stopped himself, not even sure what he was protesting. Given the danger of their recent missions, and the fact that Carter had seen Finch’s face, he didn’t really want Finch out working the cases on his own. The reclusive dom almost certainly had lingering trauma from the bomb, emotional if not physical, and hadn’t even slept since that point. Might well have nightmares tonight.

But leaving people to die would just burden Finch with more guilt that he didn’t need to bear.

At a stoplight, Finch allowed his eyes to close for a few seconds; then he let out a breath. The aura John could pick up on shown with mingled resignation, fear, hope, and a hint of pride. “I’m well aware that, at times, we’ll be unable to handle certain cases. We’re not superheroes, Mr. Reese; it’s important to acknowledge our limitations. And I can hardly expect you to be in top form if you’ve been drugged—and _shot_. I’m unwilling to risk all further good you might do on the possibility of losing one or two people.”

“One or two _more_ , you mean.” It was hard to get past the awareness that they’d saved only half of their targets, this time.

“You saved _two_ , and that’s the more important number to focus on, right now.” Finch’s emotions solidified into determination, acceptance, and pride—John was surprised to realize that the pride was directed at _him_. “You saved two women who otherwise would have died. And you put yourself at great risk to do so, as you so often do; in this case, it exposed you to the CIA, through no fault of your own. I could ask no more of you, Mr. Reese, and I must confess that I’ve been unthinkingly lax about seeing to your aftercare.”

Finch wore an expression of quiet fury, but even a surface reading said it was directed at himself, not at John. “I haven’t really worked directly with subs before,” Finch continued, “let alone in such a sequestered setup, where you’re not entirely free to seek out… whatever your preference might be, in terms of personal care and comfort. I do hope, in future, that you’ll help me to understand when what I have provided is not enough; it’s important to me that you’re properly taken care of.”

John’s head lolled back against the headrest, the warm waves of dom approval washing over him and pushing back the pain of his leg and knee. Harold cared about him. Harold _forgave_ him—no, even better, he didn’t seem to think there was anything to forgive. Harold was giving him explicit permission to seek out his own benefit, even at the expense of the mission. Maybe it was just in the heat of the moment, where concern for John’s safety overrode every other concern, but that didn’t dull the keen awareness of his dom’s pleasure.

He flashed back to a few weeks ago, after rescuing Zoe and putting a stop to Virtanen Pharmaceuticals’ plan to cover up the deaths of hundreds. When he’d come home—back to the library—he’d walked right into Harold’s unreserved satisfaction, both with the way the case turned out and with John’s work in particular. That had been a heady treat, the delight of a job well done and a dom well pleased. 

Or was that memory simply tinged with the drugs that were flooding into his system even now? The soft, heady pleasure of the hypomethylin was suffusing through him, wrapping over his brain. Faster than expected. Less chance for Finch to get them somewhere safe. And that wasn’t the only problem…

“Finch,” John murmured, “less than an hour of this and I might to be begging you to bond me.”

Finch huffed, indifferent to the idea. “Assuming I understand this correctly, I could simply order you to stop doing that. And I’m certain that I have more than enough self-control for the both of us. It shouldn’t be an issue.”

Maybe a few months ago, John might’ve been concerned at the thought of Finch trying to bond him, but he was strong enough that it wasn’t an issue he put much thought into. Now? If Harold had the slightest desire, John doubted if he’d have put up even token resistance. Just enough to make sure that Harold was doing it for his own reasons, not merely to be nice to John; John really did get enough from being near Finch, and didn’t need a full bond to be happy or healthy or comfortable, even if those were considerations for him anymore. He certainly didn’t need a full bond to be fully operational.

But Finch wasn’t shielded enough to hide that kind of desire from John… was he? John was justifiably confident in his ability to read people, even people like Finch who did their best to hide their inner life from the world around them. If Finch had wanted him, it would be one thing, but Finch appeared to be a solitary dom—the kind with no inclination to control others, and his disgust over Carter’s assertion to the contrary had spoken for itself. _That_ feeling had come through clear and strong, and it wasn’t the first time that John had noticed Finch’s distaste for controlling other people. If Finch considered even the normal dom/sub relationship to be exploitative, well, he wasn’t the only dom to think that way, these days.

John’s shoulder throbbed where the needle had stabbed in. He reached under his shirt and rubbed at the hot skin… then froze as his fingers found a lump there. Careful exploration revealed it to be a thin line, about the size of a grain of rice, and it hurt when he pushed on it; had the needle broken off, under the skin?

No.

“Finch, stop,” he blurted. “They put a tracker in me. Drop me off somewhere and—”

“Certainly not,” Finch snapped. In the mirror, his eyes were dark and determined, though he didn’t take his gaze off the road. “I may not be your master or your keeper, Mr. Reese, but neither am I the kind of dom who could abandon his partner at their most vulnerable.”

“Harold—”

“This eventuality is one of many that I have prepared for,” Finch said firmly. “In the thirty-odd years that I’ve been on the run, I have amassed _some_ experience in evading capture, so I ask that you trust me a little further tonight.”

Caught between the implied command and the relief that Finch had some plan in mind, John slumped back against the seat again, unable to keep up the level of alert. “No wonder Snow’s in no hurry to chase us down,” he muttered.

“Well, that factor will soon be taken care of,” Finch asserted with a huff.

The next few minutes passed in silence, John focused on fighting back the urge to just collapse, to let Harold’s will become his own will and to lose all sense of self-determination in service to his dom. The hypomethylin was slowly eating away at his sense of self, helped along by the pain and the fact that he was in a place where he felt safe. It was a false sense of security, given that they were still on the run and their pursuers might be right behind them, but part of his brain registered the car as a place where he could relax and recover, even (if need be) fall asleep.

Fighting off Snow’s dominion had taken a fair amount of energy, even before the other guy had gotten the jump on him; by this point, his resources were pretty low, so it didn’t take much of a push for the drug to worm its way in, whispering at him to stop resisting, to just accept the pleasure, just _give in_.

The battle itself made him lose track of his surroundings; between one moment and the next, they had gone from the street to the inside of a large garage, with the door dropping quickly behind them, before John had even quite taken in their surroundings.

After quickly checking the camera feed on his phone, Harold got out, grabbing his laptop bag. John couldn’t think straight enough to follow, but then Harold was opening his door. “Time to get out, John,” he said, and the command, however lightly phrased, brought John out and to attention instantly.

Harold’s frown deepened. “How bad is the wound on your leg?” he asked, and John’s mind focused on accurately feeling that out: the pain, the wetness of the blood soaking through his pant leg, the stretch of his broken skin whenever he took a step.

“I’m losing blood, but so far it’s not all that much,” he said. “They meant to take me in alive, so the shot was meant to incapacitate, not kill. Makes it harder to walk, but I can deal with the pain and keep moving, I’m just a little slower than normal. Do you want specs on the weapon?”

“Not particularly,” Harold said. “I had intended to give you first aid immediately, but the tracker makes this location unsafe. Would a delay of some ten or fifteen minutes cause any significant problems for your treatment?”

He shook his head. “I should be fine.”

It didn’t get rid of Harold’s frown. “Much as I’ve learned not to trust your assertions on that matter, we don’t seem to have much choice. Do you think you could douse the car in gasoline?” he asked, searching John’s face.

“Yes,” John said; orders were easy, something shining to focus on. “Where’s the gas?”

Indicating a shelf with a couple of gas cans, Harold nodded once, sharply. “I need to gather some supplies while you do that. Please get the car ready to burn, but don’t let it catch fire until I’m ready. I believe you can prepare the car in under two minutes. Is this something that you will have any trouble accomplishing?”

He’d burned cars before. “Not at all.”

“Good,” Harold said, and another wash of pure pleasure shot down John’s spine. “If I’m not back in four minutes, or if you start to feel dizzy, or if the smell gets to be too strong for you, then leave by the back door—” he indicated the desired exit “—and wait for me.”

“I will,” John said, taking the gas can.

The task was over quickly and efficiently, and almost without thought; John was riding the wave of the command, a little amusement bubbling up over Harold knowing exactly what he needed right now. Without direct commands, John would’ve been incapable of helping with the escape plan, incapable of figuring out what to do on his own, but with Harold’s hand on the rudder of his brain, they were a perfect team.

He could’ve guessed that, really; Harold had been perfect for him since the day they’d met, but it had taken him a while to accept that. To appreciate it. Even if they never actually bonded, their partnership was more than enough. For now. For life. However long Harold still wanted him.

Almost precisely three minutes after the order had been given, Harold was back, handing John a small electronic device. “The ignition source,” he said, briefly flashing a remote that just as quickly went back in his pocket. “I assume you know where best to place it.”

John did, and then Harold led him into the house, closing a heavy door between them and the garage. “It took quite a bit of work to put this place together,” Harold said soberly; “I’m almost sad to see it go. It’s hard to arrange for a contained fire like this.” He opened a little panel on the remote, and pressed a button; John barely heard the _whoosh_ of the fire starting in the garage. A little monitor near the door showed that the back seat was already burning brightly. “There we go.”

John followed Harold out the back door and across to the adjoining lot, on the opposite side of the block. Into another car, waiting for them. After starting the car, Harold pressed a second button on the remote, and smoke started billowing out of the upper windows of the house.

They got three blocks before Harold’s phone chirped, and Harold relaxed a little. “Good. Someone’s called it in, so I don’t have to.”

“You take paranoia to new levels,” John murmured over the fuzzing in his head.

“Well. There are times when a little extra time, a new car, and a major distraction can make all the difference in the world. Now let’s get to an _actual_ safe house, shall we?”

Harold said it firmly, and John didn’t bother trying to fight it; there were too many mixed emotions there, and his desire to do things differently wasn’t strong enough or clear enough to let him fight off the drugs that were already starting to affect his brain.

A worry wormed its way into his mind, though. “What about the tracker?” he asked suddenly. The distraction didn’t matter if they were just going to follow the car—

“This car’s shielded,” Harold said calmly. “As is the place we’ll be hiding in. A perfect Faraday shield, once we’re inside. And you needn’t worry about cameras catching the switch-off. In addition to redirecting law enforcement, the emergency protocol takes out any broadcasting cameras in a five-block radius. I don’t doubt that the CIA will eventually locate some feeds that weren’t taken down by their efforts or mine, but all they’ll get is the car, which might, given time, lead them here. There are no cameras within range of the burner house; I technically own all the buildings within visual range of that block, and the rental agreements stipulate no street-facing cameras, ostensibly for the privacy of the neighborhood.”

“You’ve… certainly taken some precautions. I’m surprised you managed to set that all up within a year. Or was it back while you were working on the Machine?”

“Oh, that was all set up, hmm, more than a decade before I even dreamed up the Machine. I replenish the gas every few months, do a quick rundown to make sure it’s all operational. My employees park a different car in the lot every few days, retrieve the one that’s been sitting there. I’ve always had a few ways to leave the city quickly and without being followed, and that was one of the more extreme plans. Right now, it affords us extra time.”

John simply nodded.

“The thing is, although the car and the safe house are both shielded… the trip from the car to the safe house is unfortunately not so thoroughly protected. There’s a first aid kit on the back of the passenger seat; can you get it out, please?”

John did.

“There should be a scalpel, some gauze, iodine, a shot of lidocaine. Butterfly bandages, and an Ace bandage as well. Can you get them out, please? Take care not to open the individual packages; they’re all sterile.”

That wasn’t too hard, especially with John’s focus ramped up like this.

Harold parked the car down an alley, and pulled a flashlight out of the glove box. Then he twisted himself to look backwards and frowned. Frustration and worry—he wanted to get in the back seat with John, but his body simply wasn’t capable of the move, not without hurting himself. Shortly, he sighed, opened the door, walked around, and slid into the back seat next to John.

“Let me see your leg,” Harold said, and John raised his knee a bit, wincing at the tug of the angle against his broken skin. Carefully, Harold prodded at the wet fabric, but there wasn’t much that he could do without removing John’s pants. “I’m afraid all I can do is bandage it up, for now,” he said. “We’ll deal with it at the safe house.”

John slid down a bit, giving Harold the space he needed to cover the wound with gauze and wind the Ace bandage around his thigh.

When Harold was done, John stripped off his shirt and turned his back, safe in the hands of his dom.

A little worry came from Harold, concern over being able to do this correctly, to not hurt John more than was unavoidable. But his hands were steady when he started, and his moves were quick, efficient. John’s shoulder was sterilized, numbed, cut open while John rode the pleasure of doing exactly what Harold wanted of him right now. Within minutes, Harold was bandaging him up.

“I can stitch it up when we get to the safe house,” Harold said, business-like, his queasiness not coming out through his voice at all. Harold would do whatever was necessary to protect John and to care for his welfare and comfort; since there was no one else to stitch him up, Harold was going to manage it. There wasn’t even a question, in either of their minds.

The tracker was a tiny, fragile device; John rolled it between his fingers, the blood coating his skin. “Probably easy to break,” he mused, with no thought as to whether he should break it or not. Harold would know.

“Give that here,” Harold said, and John did, instantly. Harold briskly wiped off the excess blood, then bundled it up in a little pack of gauze and taped the gauze together. Then he quickly sterilized his hands.

“I’ll be right back; stay here,” he said, and got out again.

Time passed, but John wasn’t much paying attention; it could have been seconds or minutes before Harold got back into the driver’s seat, grim satisfaction rolling off of him in waves. As he started up the car again and backed out of the alley, John wondered dopily what Harold’s next command might be.


	4. Information Exchange

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold wrestles with his reaction to information about John—and what the drug is, and isn't, doing to him.

Twenty minutes ago, Harold had been racing to John’s side, knowing from the sinking feeling in his gut that he was most likely about to be arrested, or possibly shot. But what other choice had there been? Nathan’s death had sealed in Harold’s fate: He was bound to the numbers as thoroughly as any bonded sub, and a full year of failures had left him acutely aware that John was, quite literally, the only person capable of dealing with the cases in a way that preserved lives without letting information about the Machine slip out into the general public.

Leaving John to get taken had never been a possibility.

As they left the alley and got back into traffic, Harold found the silence from the back seat unnerving. Just John’s steady breaths, almost hypnotic in their rhythm. How strong was the effect by now? Perhaps John was devoting all his effort to fighting it off. In a way, he wanted to be able to tell John that he could stop fighting, that he could just let the drug affect him and Harold would take care of him in the meantime—but he didn’t have all the facts about the drug, or what additional precautions were warranted. Besides, they still had to climb some stairs; he couldn’t have John collapsing on him just yet.

Preserving John’s privacy and autonomy (as much as was possible, under these circumstances)… that also mattered to Harold, but, by now, it seemed obvious that trying to avoid giving John directions was a potential liability. And, in order to best protect John’s long-term welfare, he really did need to know information that it was far too late to acquire in the ordinary way.

“Mr. Reese,” he said, “I need to know the specs on that drug. Please tell me any information that I am likely to find useful, with a focus on keeping us both safe and keeping you as comfortable as is reasonably possible at this point.”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes before it hits peak,” John said, voice even and clear. “It’s a form of Ritalin. Something they discovered while trying to treat ADHD in extreme subs. Focuses my attention on the strongest dom in the room, and shuts down my ability to resist orders, until I’m even less resistant than an omega-class sub. It’s tied into the reward center of the brain, which means that following orders sets off a feedback loop. Fighting is painful and distressing; while the drugs are at peak, it’s on the level of a severe migraine in under two minutes. Giving in is pleasurable, relaxing. It feels _right_ to give in. Better than heroin. Every part of my brain is going to want to be a good sub for my dom, and it doesn’t even matter who the dom is.”

“Dear Lord,” Harold breathed. “Is it addictive?” He was already trying to imagine how to get a black market supply to properly wean John off the stuff—and suppressing a shiver at the thought of what it could mean that a black-market supply of this particular substance even _existed_. Was it reasonable to hope that this was one secret the government had actually managed to keep locked up tight, the way it failed with practically every other secret it got its hands on?

“Emotionally, yeah,” John said. “I mean, you want to get back to that state—it’s hard _not_ to want that, especially your first time coming off of it. The world was right, and now it’s not. But it’s not physically addictive, not in the regulation doses. I had no trouble getting back to training with no adverse side effects.”

That, at least, was a blessing.

“Later on—around the third session—they ordered us, ahead of time, to fight off the effects.” Harold caught a glimpse of John’s scowl in the mirror, the anger and agony of memory written large across his face. “You don’t know— of course you don’t know what it’s like to _want_ to submit, as though it’s the only hope of happiness you have left in the world, and then… to find that you’re not only incapable of doing what you’re told, but incapable of figuring out what it is that you’re doing wrong.”

John chuckled mirthlessly. “They really fucked with us that day. There were only five of us left, and they gave us the most degrading orders, while shouting at us to resist, resist, resist. Had some fake ordnance, too; made us try to kill each other, kill _ourselves_. Kill our commanders. Put grenades in our mouths and pull the pin. Just to make it clear to us that once those drugs have you, once you’re in that bliss mode, you really can’t do anything to stop yourself. Best-kept secret in the CIA, that stuff. The doms don’t want other nations to learn how to control our subs, and the subs don’t want to be vulnerable to the possibility.” He paused. “I’m surprised I told Carter as much as I did.”

“You said whatever you needed to say to get her to relent,” Harold mused. “I can understand that. Besides, you trusted her… despite what she did tonight.”

“The thing is… there are some things in my brain that I literally cannot talk about. Maybe— _maybe_ —if a powerful dom ordered me to, but, even then, it’s more likely that there’s a kill order in there, just for that eventuality. Make sure I can’t give out the most important state secrets, even if I wanted to. Even if I was terrified not to.”

“A kill order?” Harold confirmed, horrified.

John tapped his temple. “There’s a lot of triggers they established during training, while I was deep into the thrall of subspace. I don’t even know what all’s in there. Code words, probably; might be something like a sleeper agent going on, though I suppose Snow doesn’t know them or he’d’ve used them on me back there. Unless they’re the kind of codes I can fight off; he might’ve been waiting for this stuff to kick in before he used them.”

“But you might be able to resist them when you’re sober?”

“That’s what switches _do_ ,” John said. “We’re the one type of agent whose value lies in being able to resist orders. But the amount of time we spent in deep subspace, getting trained while we weren’t even consciously aware of what was going on… there’s probably some stuff in there to countermand us, if need be. Commands that I’ll obey without question; instincts they’ve built up and tied to specific commands. Maybe being separated from the unit for so long has dulled them a bit, but I wouldn’t trust myself right now. Not with this stuff in my system.”

“I don’t suppose it’s something clever, like _You were/will be from Gandahar_ ,” Harold murmured, then stiffened up a little at the realization that he’d said that aloud. He glanced in the mirror, but John didn’t seem affected.

“Not that one, apparently. Although I wouldn’t go trying to guess at weird code phrases; you might hit one.”

“Good point,” Harold agreed, and merged onto the bridge. Even given the hour, the traffic was surprisingly light—perhaps because of the attention drawn to the far side of the city.

“Once I’m safe,” John said, “you can leave. You… you _should_ leave.” There was something odd about the cadence of his voice, a little like being drunk but not exactly. Not slurry or indistinct or lacking intelligent thought, just… it seemed to be careful, overly enunciated, as though John were fighting for every word.

Harold frowned. “We’ve already settled that question, Mr. Reese. I will be staying here with you, for as long as necessary. If a case arises, it’s either going to be the kind that requires your expertise, which we simply can’t provide right now, or the type that does not, in which case it’s unlikely that an extra twenty-four hours will mean the difference between life and death. And I could conceivably call in Fusco, if I considered it a priority work the numbers while we’re here.”

“I’m not so concerned about the numbers, Finch. You just… you don’t know what it’s like, dealing with a sub on hypomethylin.”

“I imagine I’m about to find out.”

“You don’t want that. You don’t want to see me like that. It’s been, what, half an hour? Almost at peak. You don’t… it’s so hard to push back right now. Even your _implied_ commands. I’ll end up doing things you don’t actually want, thinking that I understand your wishes. I won’t be able to say no. Won’t be able to contradict you. In anything.”

Harold’s eyebrows shot up. “Do you… do you consider me to be a threat to you, in this state? I hadn’t even considered…” Wishing he could stop what he was doing and look John in the face, he settled for hoping that John would pick up his intentions. “I hope you understand that I would never take advantage of you like this. It’s hardly my intention to go prying into your secrets, let alone forcing you to do things that you wouldn’t normally want to do. I’m simply here to see to your safety, and, if my precautions have been insufficient, to be able to take secondary measures if necessary.”

“That’s… that’s not the point.” John took a deep breath. “I’m not scared of what you’ll do to me, Harold. Just… concerned that what I end up doing might… trouble you,” he trailed off, voice a little tight. Harold almost missed his wince in the mirror.

“I assure you, Mr. Reese, that, at this point, I am far more concerned with _your_ welfare than I am with my own. You’ve already said that there’s no direct danger to either of us. Whatever embarrassment comes of this, I’m certain that we’re capable of weathering it. Unless you have any further concerns that I ought to know about?”

“No,” John said. “You’re right. There’s no danger.” But his voice had gone a little looser, relaxed in a way that did not make Harold feel more at ease.

By the time Harold pulled into the parking structure underneath the safe house, John’s estimate of twenty to twenty-five minutes was down to just eight… though Harold wondered how accurate the estimate could be, given that John had already shown signs of losing track of time. Regardless, though, it wouldn’t be long before John was entirely lost to the world; at some point, it would be Harold’s will that carried John forward, and that was only assuming that there was no other dom between them and the door. It was highly unlikely that anyone had figured out his destination ahead of time; there were more than enough layers of obfuscation between his safe houses and his active identities, let alone between his safe houses and _John_ , who wasn’t even allowed to know where most of them existed until the day they needed one. But there was always the chance of squatters, in an apartment complex that went empty. His algorithms were good, but not foolproof, and there were a lot of safe houses to keep track of.

Of course—and he was going by gut feeling here, not having any statistics to draw from—the likelihood of being a strong dom _and_ a squatter was pretty low. So he wasn’t too worried about that, right now.

“We’re here, John,” Harold said as he parked next to the stairwell. In the mirror, he caught sight of John, who was calmly watching him… not his mirror-face, but the back of his head, staring fixedly as if he somehow found Harold’s hair to be _fascinating_. “It’s time to go in,” Harold said, and John instantly moved to open the door and get out.

In deference to John’s wounded leg, Harold took the elevator, even though he tried to avoid hackable machinery while being actively pursued. Once the door closed, Harold felt a little better, though he wouldn’t be able to relax until they were properly inside the safe house.

Likely not even then; it really depended on what all the drug might do to John.

“It’s funny,” John said, a little dreamily. “I sometimes wondered what you’d do, if I were compromised like this. Not like _this_ , exactly, but… if you could give me commands. If I wouldn’t fight them off. What you’d ask for. What you’d want me to do.”

Frowning, Harold turned to regard John. “Is oversharing a side effect of the drug?”

John paused, and blinked. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean, does the drug cause you to say things you wouldn’t normally say? Spill out secrets?”

“A little, I guess. Not the really important ones, but… it feels good. Warm and flowing, like riding a wave. Your inhibitions aren’t even a concern anymore.”

“So it _will_ cause you to say things you’d normally keep hidden. Things you’d prefer I didn’t know.”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Then I _do_ have a command for you,” Harold said firmly. “Don’t tell me anything that you would normally want to keep hidden from me. Unless it’s important for me to know it, for your safety or my own.”

“All right,” John said, expression suffused with pleasure, as the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened.


	5. Desires

Half a minute later, Harold was carefully disarming the security features on the only door in the entire complex that mattered. And then he was breathing a sigh of relief: They were inside, the door was closed, the door was locked, the fortifications secure. Anyone trying to get in would be forced to spend hours with blowtorches—or explosives—and they’d have plenty of warning for such a breach.

Limping over to the sofa, Harold tried to shift mental gears. He’d been so focused on finding shelter, getting to safety, that it was unexpectedly difficult to start considering what to do next. As he laid his laptop bag on the low table in front of the sofa, he sighed. No internet, no interruptions, and a good twenty hours or more before they could reasonably get back to work. He couldn’t really see the next steps to take, except for killing time, which he positively _abhorred_.

But, of course, there were still a few matters to attend to. Tending to John’s injuries, that was obvious. He turned to John. “Have a seat; I’ll be right back with first aid supplies.”

As Harold limped over to the bathroom, he made a mental note to install first aid kits near the front door, in future. When he’d been setting up the safe houses, he’d had no reason to consider being wounded, let alone permanently disabled. With all his other careful, nigh-prescient preparations, it was almost laughable that such an obvious detail had escaped him.

The bathroom was a bit dusty. Under the sink, the towels were in a sealed plastic box; he pulled out a small one, dusted down the counter and the sink, and then laid the dusty towel over the side of the tub. A second small towel got used up as well, half to wash the counter and the other half to dry it, before he was satisfied with the cleanliness enough to move on.

After washing his hands thoroughly, he hung up a towel for drying his hands, and then pulled the kit out of a drawer—luckily, it wasn’t dusty—and brought it and a couple clean towels back to the living room.

He came to a halt at the sight of John sitting calmly on the very edge of the sofa… in his boxers. Harold took in John’s trousers on the table (neatly folded, bloody side up), his hand pressed tightly against his bare thigh, the drying trails of blood that had dripped down his leg, and John’s expression (intent and happy, and so focused on Harold that it was practically a form of worship) before he centered himself enough to keep walking.

Trying to push back his embarrassment—surely first aid was more important than propriety—Harold couldn’t help but file this away as the first time he’d seen John’s bare legs. And the rest of it… a lot of little details that Harold would have wanted, like being careful not to get bloodstains on either the sofa or the table, but done so obviously for _Harold’s_ wishes that the awareness roused a sense of shame. It was so unlike John to be that careful with the details of what Harold wanted; if it had been John’s initiative, that would be one thing, but this was just the drugs _forcing_ John to please his dom.

As Harold placed the first aid kit on the table—a respectable distance from the bloody trousers—John said, “I’m sorry.”

Harold blinked at him.

“You want me to do things on my own,” John continued, “and that’s pretty much the one thing I can’t do right now. I’m running on whatever I think you want me to do; I can’t see any other path.”

“You warned me about that, yes,” Harold said, opening up the kit. “My discomfort with the idea is hardly your problem.”

“That’s not how this works,” John said, frowning. “I can sense your emotions more clearly than ever, and the drugs make me want to make you happy. No… being a _sub_ makes me want to make you happy, and the drugs wipe away any reason to fight that impulse. When you’re upset, it’s like… there’s this imbalance in the world, and every part of me wants to fix it, to make things right again. I can’t separate myself from that. Not while I’m like this.”

Laying out the necessary supplies—gauze and bandages, latex gloves, alcohol wipes, more lidocaine in case he needed it—Harold tried to absorb that idea. “So my… emotions… the way I feel about this, that can hurt you now?”

“They can’t harm me, but, well… it’s part of the lizard brain. If I were a good sub, you’d be happy; if you’re not happy, I must not be a good sub. And being a bad sub is painful. But that’s… it’s not…” John grimaced. “You value my welfare, so being a good sub means… taking care of myself, as well. That’s not how this usually works. Usually, it’s up to me to try to be good, and it’s not the dom’s responsibility whether that’s possible or not.”

It took some effort to tamp down his emotions, so as not to hurt John further. “So they set you up for failure,” Harold summarized, darkly, as he brought over a table lamp and aimed it at John’s leg.

“Sometimes,” John replied, unconcerned, as Harold placed a cushion near John’s feet and then headed back to wash his hands again. “That’s domright, isn’t it?”

Harold bit his tongue until he was back in the room. “If a dom has any inherent right over a sub,” he asserted, “it’s the right to command them and test them. Not to torture them.” He put on the gloves. “That’s one of the reasons that I despise the history of domright, and all its historical abuses. It took humanity far too long to appreciate that no one group is less deserving of rights than the others.”

After carefully sitting himself on the cushion, Harold began to wipe down John’s skin, slowly working his way up toward the wound. John’s hand moved as soon as he needed it to, a reminder of how clearly John could perceive his intent like this.

It might have been endearing, if John’s volition were part of the equation. Harold tried to stay focused on the task, rather than let himself feel anything right now, good or bad.

“Well,” he said, thankful that the wound had mostly stopped bleeding, “we’re safe, for the moment. So aside from tending to your wounds, is there anything that you need me to do for you?”

“You could ask me to do anything,” John said.

“I could, but that doesn’t answer my question. Is there anything you _need_? Anything that would make it safer for you, or more comfortable?”

John hesitated, considering. “I would be safer _and_ more comfortable if you bonded me. But you don’t want that.”

In the middle of sterilizing the skin around John’s wound, Harold froze, and looked up at John, dumbfounded. “…What?”

“Being bonded is inherently more pleasurable for a sub than being a ronin. And it would give me an anchor, which would make it easier for me to resist other doms… even doms stronger than _you_ —make it harder for them to use me. The military did some studies on whether being bonded would let a sub resist orders while under hypomethylin. The results weren’t sufficient for the CIA to justify forcing switches to bond with their handlers, but there was some evidence that it gave them a little more control, especially if the bonded dom gave them counter-orders ahead of time. So, if we were bonded, it’s possible that your orders would countermand even the triggers in my head. It’s not certain, but it would definitely be safer, for both of us, if you did bond me.”

Horror flushed through Harold at the sheer, cold pragmatism of John’s thought process. Creating bonds merely to keep subs from being dominated by _other_ doms? Was the CIA really so invested in their operations that they would go beyond all sense of decency and human rights and actually demand that the switches submit to a bond they didn’t want?

“You don’t—” he said, his voice cracking. He paused and centered himself. “You don’t want to bond with me, though. I can’t see that you’ve ever wanted me to have that much control over you. And even if you said so now, I couldn’t take it at face value, because your ability to choose has been compromised.”

“That’s why it’s not going to happen,” John said, and frowned. “You asked what you could do that would make me safer and more comfortable, and that’s the only thing I can think of. But you’ve never wanted it, and you don’t want it this way, so… that makes it simpler. I’m… I’m not going to beg for something I know the dom doesn’t want.”

Almost, Harold touched John’s arm, but the blood on his hand made him stop short. He searched John’s face. “It’s not… is this something you _do_ want, normally? Don’t tell me if your normal self wouldn’t want me to know.”

“I’ve never really _wanted_ it,” John said. “Because I’ve never let myself consider it. There’s no point yearning after things I can’t have.”

Harold swallowed. “Can’t have?” he echoed, his voice sounding hollow to his own ears. “So you… if you thought you could get it, is this… is a bond something you actually _want?_ ”

John blinked at him. “What sub doesn’t?” he asked, plainly.

Harold flustered. “But you… you’ve never shown the slightest indication that you want to submit to me. Not even in the little things. From the moment we met, you’ve been defying my orders and my wishes in every way you can get away with; you never do _anything_ in precisely the way you know that I desire it. Feet on the furniture, shelving books in ways you know will annoy me, poking into my private affairs after I made it _very_ clear what I think of that…” He swallowed again. “It was far more pronounced than with any dom I’ve ever worked with. I thought… I thought you were making it clear that you weren’t the kind of dom who kowtowed to his employer.

“Now that I know you’re a sub, I… I haven’t really had the chance to think about it, but surely it’s a way of saying that you’re not the kind of sub who lets a dom walk all over him? How does that even _begin_ to mesh with an actual bond?”

“Am I the first switch that you’ve ever had to deal with? We’re _trained_ to never follow an order in precisely the way it’s given, and not to follow it at all if given by an authority outside the hierarchy. Trained to consciously evade the desires of the doms around us, unless there’s reason to pretend otherwise. By now, it’s habit.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Harold stammered, wide-eyed, “that you’ve been irritating me all these months because the military _trained_ you to do that?”

“Well… yeah. Kinda the point. Plus, it helps avoid the impression that we’re subs, which makes it easier to infiltrate certain areas.”

“Then you don’t… I mean… I was under the impression that you didn’t trust me yet. That eventually you _would_ trust me, and that I would know because you’d stop fighting me this way.”

“That’s not going to happen without a bond… or significant effort on my part, if you’d really prefer that I follow your directions more carefully. Enough effort that it might actually distract me from my regular operations.”

Harold’s gaze fell back to John’s leg, to the iodine stain around the wound; he had a sudden, horrified thought. “Those times when you put yourself in greater danger despite my orders—is that part of this, too? Did you put yourself in danger just to avoid following my commands?”

“No. Not… not consciously, at least. There’s plenty of reasons that I don’t take as much care with my safety as you’d like me to, but that’s not one of them.”

 _That_ was a relief, but quite a tepid one. Shaking off his shock, Harold switched gloves and started applying antibiotic cream to the wound. It was a moment before he could put his whirling thoughts into words. “But you do… you would, or, well, I mean… you might choose to accept me, if I offered? When you’re not under thrall like this?”

“Not if I thought that you didn’t really want it. Sometimes you do things for me and I’m pretty sure that you’re subordinating your own wishes to mine. That’s not the sort of thing I would ever want. Not like that.”

“But if you thought that I _did_ want it?” Harold asked, searching John’s face again.

John looked skeptical. “You’d really have to persuade me. Up until tonight, I was convinced that you hated the idea of having power over anyone else, and your reaction to Carter confirmed it… I thought. Not the only dom I’ve met like that; biology isn’t the sum total of our beings.”

“If you honestly believed that I wanted it?”

“Harold, I…” Briefly, John seemed to struggle.

Again, Harold nearly touched John’s arm, almost by reflex, but drew back in time to avoid contamination. “Don’t tell me if you’d prefer that I not know.”

“It’s not that, it’s just… I’ve never tried to think of you like that before.” John’s eyes darted about, studying Harold but then jerking away, as if trying not to stare at a bright light for too long. “Right now, you’re the most important dom in my life. You’ve given me _everything_ , things I never thought I could have again. Hope, and purpose, and trust. The assurance that I’m doing the right thing, and that there’s someone there to help me know if I get on the wrong path again… someone who’ll help me make better choices, but not reject me for my failures. Someone whose moral compass is better calibrated than mine. I’ve seen your strength of will, your courage in the face of danger, so I know you’re not going to force me to do things I’ll regret.

“All the things that I might want from a dom, you’ve already given me, in abundance. The benefit of a bond itself… there’s this constant friction in my head, my biology telling me to give in and my training telling me to stand firm. Training usually wins. I have to weigh each and every order I receive to figure out if it’s one I ought to be following or not. If we were bonded, your orders would feel different, so I could let go of some of that. Accept your judgment as a given, and countermand it only when your safety’s at stake, or when it’s an area where I’ve got more experience than you do. Dealing with armed enemies, for instance.

“So if you were offering the biological and psychological benefit of an actual bond, well… I can’t see any good reason to refuse. It’s something that would benefit both of us, in many ways, and it would be a source of pleasure and joy for me. So yes, if I knew that you honestly wanted it, I’d accept it from you.”

Harold’s head was spinning, all the implications of this revelation hitting him at once, indistinguishable. Silently, he turned back to the first aid, trying to sort through his thoughts. Did he _want_ a bond with John? Did he even want a bond in the first place? What would change, if they were bonded? How would it affect John? Would that be of benefit to John? Would it protect him, in the field?

What of the down side? Were there any hypothetical future benefits that a bond could get in the way of? He couldn’t see himself choosing to bond with any _other_ sub, that much was true. And it wasn’t like there were many prospects for either of them, not with the limited time they had left and the task to which both had devoted their remaining lifespan.

 _Sooner or later, both of us’ll probably wind up dead_.

If it had been a question of sex, or marriage, then he would have been wrestling with thoughts of Grace, and whether it was a betrayal to seek such pleasures with another person while she was still alive—even if she thought _him_ dead. He’d left her with unresolved pain, and choosing to honor his commitment despite their separation was part of how he chose to balance that debt. But the dom/sub relationship wasn’t either; it was wholly unlike the kind of relationship he’d had with Grace.

He had to grin a little at the thought of Grace holding that kind of power over him—let alone him controlling _her_ that way. Marriage was for equals, an equal distribution of power and rights and responsibilities. But domination was a relationship that went back to a time before marriage had existed, before equality was considered valuable. It was tied into the most primitive parts of the brain, and had bled out across the rest of the structure as it evolved to account for new ideas: group dynamics and language and ethics, hypothetical concepts and complex inventions and the virtual world. But of all the pleasures that mankind could experience, one of the simplest and strongest was the pleasure of bonding—or so he’d heard. He’d never taken the time to consider what it might be like to accept such a bond; he’d never run across any sub with whom he felt a connection. Not until he’d met John.

John, the one man in the world with whom he could share… not everything he knew, not by a long shot, but the big important things that he would have to hide with anyone else. If he were going to bond with any sub at all, it would _have_ to be John.

And John was saying that he wanted it. Or _would_ want it, if Harold wanted it. If they were both doing it freely, and for their own benefit as much as for the other’s….

But, of course, John was drugged. And that meant that Harold couldn’t accept anything that he said at face value. After he finished taping up John’s leg, he looked up at John again. “How much of what you’re telling me is because of the drugs?”

“I’m answering your question because the drugs are telling me to obey you. It’s not a matter that I want to specifically hide from you, and the answer itself isn’t different because of the drugs.”

“Why are you even lucid right now? I had understood that the drugs would be putting you into some sort of, ah, hypnotic state.”

“You’re the dom. You want to talk this out; you want information. That’s your desire, and I’m following that desire.” In one fluid motion, John pulled his shirt off and turned away, wincing a little with the motion; it took Harold staring for a long moment to realize that John was, again, anticipating his desires, this time to let him look at John’s shoulder. “The drugs make me highly suggestive,” John continued, “and ensure that I don’t take much initiative, but they don’t take away my ability to think or respond.”

After getting to his feet, somewhat painfully—grateful that John didn’t try to help, though that was probably John realizing that he didn’t _want_ the help—Harold sat behind John, and aimed the light at his shoulder. “So you’re perfectly capable of holding a normal conversation while deep into the thrall of subspace?”

“It’s not… _exactly_ the same as subspace. You know how banana flavoring never tastes like bananas?” Harold made a face, and John responded with a fond chuckle. “Yeah. Chemical weirdness meant to taste like it, or, well, to make the brain think it’s good enough. But think about what this conversation might be like if you were, say, an agent of the Chinese government. And I’d give them information just as readily; by this point, I wouldn’t see any reason _not_ to. That’s why the triggers.”

Harold blanched.

“Also why hypomethylin is such a well-kept secret. The only reason there’s no mental block about revealing it is that they know we’re going to hide it more thoroughly than any other secret they’ve given us.” He huffed. “Guess they never thought of any problems that might come from dosing someone who wasn’t under their control at the time.”

“I guess _not_ ,” Harold murmured, suddenly discomforted with how much they’d shared, even understanding that John was following his non-sharing command just as closely as the rest of them.

The next few minutes passed in silence, as Harold tried to determine if there was anything he could do to improve the hasty surgery he’d managed in the car. The butterfly bandages were holding the wound together pretty well, and it seemed to have partially closed up; taking the bandages off right now would likely do more harm than good. In a day or two, he’d take John to see a legitimate doctor, who could stitch him up properly—it wasn’t a gunshot wound, so it wouldn’t need to be reported—and the best he could do for it, in the meantime, was to tape a big patch of gauze over the whole thing and hope that John didn’t knock anything loose in his sleep.

Except John wouldn’t be sleeping. Not until the drugs were out of his system. But after that, he’d probably just _crash_.

Harold got to his feet again, and looked down at John, who was wearing an expression of intense pleasure.

“What?” Harold asked.

“It feels good,” John answered instantly, “to find a desire that’s clear and uncomplicated, and be able to follow it completely.”

“What desire?”

“You wanted us to stop talking,” John said, as if it were the most obvious fact about the world.

“I did, didn’t I?” Harold said. “But then I started asking for information again. Maybe I should be the one to just shut up.”

John just gazed at him, adoringly, and Harold sighed, aware that this was going to be a very long night.


	6. Elimination Round

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snow may have fumbled the pick-up, but there's another player in the game now.

“If you’d brought me in to begin with, he wouldn’t have gotten away.”

Snow blusters a bit, but he can’t refute the point. This kind of work isn’t made for lone wolves, and Evans wasn’t strong enough to keep Snow from screwing up the entire mission, or smart enough to report him earlier, when he _started_ going off the rails.

They’ve botched it enough to put Reese on the defensive, and given him a ten-minute lead. And they killed the cameras, so there’s no visual data on how Reese escaped; Snow didn’t even spot the vehicle he left in. At this point, the only data to work with is the tracker.

The signal moves fast—the guy’s breaking plenty more laws as he goes—until it slows, then cuts out for about three minutes. Comes back on for another minute and a half before cutting out again.

Either something’s blocking the signal, or he just destroyed the device. That gap in the middle… hmm. Most places don’t outright block the thing; it just bounces off walls, goes right through windows. Reese would have to have been in a fully enclosed room, or some sort of Faraday shield. And if he’s aware of the tracker, he knows it’s pointless to just hole up somewhere.

The trail goes cold at a house that’s billowing smoke, currently surrounded by fire trucks. Nice try, but far too obvious. No reason to assume some kind of underground bunker, not in this area, and the GPS data says he crossed the lot to a fairly open place. The grass says a car was parked here earlier—parked for a long time. Nothing nearby that’ll block the tracker. If the tracker was in his leg, he could just wrap it with tinfoil or something—in the house, obviously, not out in the open. A shoulder’s not that easy to block, so… a shielded car, maybe? Could be a GPS jammer, but an agent with Reese’s training would know that, for those who know to look for them, the jammers are practically more noticeable than the trackers themselves.

Quick counter-options: Not a bus or taxi, not when he’s aware that people are after him and there could be a delay. Not leaving by foot. His original car wasn’t shielded, and if he just activated a jamming unit and got back in the original car, then why the trek across the yard?

No, Reese switched cars here. And he came here specifically to block the signal, and to set up a distraction while he fled. That takes prep work. He’s had this place ready for a while now. And the likelihood that he took this route without knowing about the tracker—or at least making a good guess—is vanishingly low.

So why hasn’t he destroyed it? Possibly it’s in too deep to dig out without some better surgical equipment, or Reese isn’t in the mood to try to try surgery on his own shoulder, by himself, while on the run. Makes sense.

Digging into the camera feeds hits the first big snag: No cameras within three blocks. No way that’s a coincidence; this guy’s prepared.

Broadening the search turns up cameras that cover the exits, some of which have recorded footage. Breaking into their systems is _mostly_ trivial; it’s just going to take a while to find the useful ones.

Two minutes into that, the tracker comes back online again—briefly, twice. A few seconds each time. Doesn’t fit with entering a building. Maybe he just opened the door for some reason, or opened a window? He’s not foolish enough to hit a latte stand (and that would take longer, anyway). Did he arrange for help while driving… using a cell phone through a Faraday shielded car?

Wait… this might be simpler. Started with the assumption that he’s alone, but if he’s not… maybe he came to the house and met someone. Or maybe someone picked him up at the parking garage… except, why would they be meeting him there, if he had his own car? Awful big coincidence if he didn’t see Snow coming.

Either way, maybe he does have someone to help him. And if that’s the case, maybe they just switched drivers. Quite possibly because the drugs are starting to kick in, and Reese doesn’t trust himself to drive.

Ten minutes away, though. At least that confirms the use of a vehicle; he’s not traveling by foot.

Then the signal’s back, and this time it doesn’t go away again. And it’s moving, in stops and starts, heading northwest.

Three possibilities: Either he doesn’t realize there’s a tracker, or he realizes but can’t do anything about it right now. Or it’s a false trail; maybe he ditched the tracker on a bus or something.

Can’t discount the first two, but the third seems far more likely. Why would he go for a shielded car if he didn’t know about the tracker? And why would he ditch a shielded car if he _did_ know?

The cameras around that tracker blip are of little help—nothing pointing at the alley that the GPS points to, and only a couple cameras in the area have recorded footage instead of just realtime. There’s just too many cars to pick out likely suspects in a timely manner.

Backtracking to the house that was on fire—and is down to the smoldering stage, but still standing—and the cameras targeting the entrances and exits; it’s time to compare timestamps.

Forty minutes later, the suspects have been narrowed down to a few dozen cars that drove out of the area within five minutes of the tracker data, and either showed up in a fifteen-minute window beforehand (not prior to Snow’s attack), or hadn’t shown up at all in the past three hours. The first group, if he got picked up out back of the lot; the second group, if the car’s been sitting there a while. If these don’t pan out, it’s possible that he’d arranged to switch rides well before Snow’s attack, but that seems less likely.

Thirty-nine cars. Drop the two convertibles that probably couldn’t hide a tracker, the ones driving noticeably slower than traffic, and the ones headed away from the alley. Seventeen. Some quick heuristics cut that to nine, leaving the rest for a second pass if needed: people who stopped to pick up fast food; highly memorable cars; dogs panting out the window; a couple of old ladies. Given Reese’s injuries, he’s probably not hiding in the trunk; he couldn’t disguise himself that way in under five minutes, and the thought of his getaway driver being a little old lady is absurd (though amusing, if that turns out to be the case).

Nine cars is enough to compare with the other footage, and there’s the match: black sedan, entered the blind spot, stayed a little too long. And deviated from the tracker data almost immediately.

Time to follow that car.

They’ve got a good three-hour lead by now, and it only gets worse as the data starts to line up. They went up through Queens… and disappear in the middle of the Bronx.

The surveillance in the Bronx is spotty, to say the least, but digging into it slowly establishes a perimeter, one that the sedan enters but never leaves. Unfortunately, it’s also a perimeter that covers dozens of blocks.

Well. A challenge.

Still, that’s assuming that the tracker really was a decoy. A quick check of the data shows a direct line to New Jersey, and the signal waited around for a good two hours before heading back. Not a bus, then. Possibly a taxi, given its random meandering through the city for an hour and a half before, apparently, calling it a night.

Unlikely to be anything worth checking into.

Still… a quick call sends Snow off chasing geese for a while.

It’s well into the morning before the box has been narrowed enough to justify a more direct approach. The sedan never crossed the line; they’re holed up in this area, Reese and whoever he’s got with him (if indeed there is a partner). Unless they switched vehicles again; with the tracker down, the car is all the info there is to go on right now.

Still, that’s a half-dozen blocks to cover, and countless apartments. Reese wouldn’t be foolish enough to park out in the open, and he clearly wasn’t dropped off, so the first step is rooting through parking structures.

Gonna be annoying, but there’s no reason to put it off.

Mid-afternoon, half the obvious locations have been eliminated, but there’s still a lot to go. Lunch break, and then back into the game.

Second building sets off red flags, if only because it seems so deserted compared to the buildings around it. Not run down, just… empty of activity, all the more striking because of the hour. And it’s got cameras. Earlier, they hadn’t seemed useful, because they weren’t pointing at the street, but digging into them now reveals that the whole complex is devoid of life… and the only car on the parking level is a black sedan.

Bingo. Just in time, too: Reese got dosed around ten PM, so a good seventeen hours have gone by. Maybe another hour or two before he starts being able to fight back, and then it’s a whole different ball game. For the moment, though, he’s still a pussycat, and that’s a huge advantage to anyone trying to bring him in.

His partner, on the other hand… total mystery. No idea what skills they could be bringing to the table. But it’s unlikely that they’ll be a significant threat… not when Reese’s skills can be turned against them with a single command.

Spoofing the cameras isn’t as easy as anticipated, but eventually they go down. They’re positioned quite cleverly, too, well hidden units, avoiding any significant blind spots. And aside from the lack of people, it’s an ordinary-looking apartment complex. Which means the thing to look for is something that’s not quite so ordinary.

Takes a good hour to find it: a door on the eighth floor, unlike any door in any of the other halls. Sturdier than the rest, and better fitted to the door frame. Different key hole. Likely the kind of workmanship that’d take a good hour to cut through with a blowtorch.

Good thing there’s an easier way in.


	7. Breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold learns what it's like when John runs up against contradictory orders.

With the first aid out of the way (and John’s shirt, thankfully, back where it belonged, though the torn and bloodstained trousers remained on the table), Harold was finding it difficult to avoid contemplating a possible future relationship between him and John. More, he was finding it hard not to _want_ that; the awareness that John might possibly actually desire such a bond had dug deep into the lizard part of Harold’s brain, awakening a yearning of unexpected strength.

It was something that he didn’t want to dwell on right now, given that he still wasn’t sure that it was John talking and not just the drugs. Later on, when the drugs weren’t around to muddle the issue, then the idea might be reasonably explored between them, when it could be clear where both stood on the matter. Letting himself think it over before that point could only make him want something he couldn’t have, certainly right now and possibly at all; it might even make him susceptible to doing things that he could only regret later on.

“I could distract you from thinking about it,” John offered.

“Could you, now?” Harold mused, carefully gathering up the used medical supplies for proper disposal.

“Except you _want_ to think about it. You want to, and you don’t. That’s… confusing,” John said, his brows drawing together and his breath speeding up just a little.

“I have mixed feelings about the idea,” Harold said, doing his best to project calm; he wasn’t entirely sure how sub abilities worked, let alone when they were enhanced by illicit substances. “And it wouldn’t be entirely fair to consider the matter without being certain about _your_ desires,” he added, limping back to the bathroom, hands full of bloody bandages and swabs.

“I’ve already told you my desires,” John countered, following him. “If you actually wanted me…” As Harold washed his hands, John paused; in the mirror, Harold saw him tilt his head. “You _do_ want me.”

Harold swallowed, the water running down over his hands. “I… I-I haven’t quite…” Except that his brain was going there, dragging him along. The thought of _possessing_ John that way. Of John giving in, _letting_ him. _Wanting_ it. He’d always been turned off by the thought of forcing someone to obey him, but when that person actively _wanted_ to submit…

“I would be so good for you,” John blurted out, fervently. “And I’d love it. I’d do everything you wanted, whatever you asked of me. I’d know before you even thought to ask.”

Could John honestly mean that? Getting past that friction between them… having John meet his unspoken desires… working together on a level far faster and more accurate than words could ever convey… it was undeniably appealing, in a way he’d never expected to feel.

But. He turned the water off, and reached for a towel. “John, that’s not—”

“You’re right, it would be good, I would be so good for you. I could make you feel good—”

He turned around. “That’s not what I—”

“I could do good things for you, Harold, _please_ —”

“ _Stop that_ ,” Harold barked, and John cringed back.

“I’m sorry,” John said, instantly, ducking his head, his breath getting still faster. “You don’t want me like this. Except you want… you want me like _that_ , but not… I-I don’t, I’m doing it wrong, but… please, Finch, I don’t… what do you want me to _do?_ ”

To Harold’s horror, John crumpled to the ground at his feet, holding his head and rocking, sucking in air like he was a breath away from breaking into sobs.

_So my emotions can hurt you?_

_When you’re upset… every part of me wants to make things right again_.

 _If I were a good sub, you’d be happy; if you’re not happy, I must not be a good sub_.

“ _John_ ,” Harold choked out, staring down at his friend—his partner—and feeling lost.

 _‘I have enough self-control for the both of us,’ indeed_ , he thought viciously. _Can’t even hold enough control over your own emotions to keep from hurting—_

But at that unspoken flush of anger, John whimpered. It hadn’t been directed at him, but it was affecting him nonetheless.

Clutching at the counter behind him, Harold closed his eyes, trying to get a handle on his reactions. He’d spent thirty years learning to maintain a strict poker face, showing to the other doms and flatliners only what he wished to convey; never before had his inner turmoil been an issue, let alone a _weapon_. Inflicting pain on the man whom he valued more than any other.

Back when Harold had first been adjusting to his new limitations, to the constant pain and unexpected intensities of emotion, he’d learned a variety of ways to deal with what he could not meaningfully affect. And though it wasn’t always effective, one of the simplest was to shift his focus: to choose to think about positive things, and refuse to think about negative things.

For pain, it had been easy enough to master… but for his growing outrage at the world, it had proven nearly impossible to focus himself away from the negatives. It was far too easy to get caught up in righteous anger that bubbled away just beneath his impassive expression. Even worse, when he got caught up in fear of his own creation—a matter he was not only responsible for having brought into existence, but where he was the only person on the planet who had some means of affecting it now that it was in play.

Still, the principle was sound. Here was an area where focusing on the negative, on the outrageous, was having a profoundly negative effect on John; focusing on the positive was likely to be the only solution for it. But where were the positives in this situation?

“Please,” John whimpered at his feet. “Please…”

“It’s all right, John,” Harold said, helplessly. “Can you—” He meant to ask if John could get up, could go sit down on the sofa so they’d be more comfortable while Harold figured out what to do, but John was already on his feet and rushing to the living room, as if he was determined to prove that he could be what Harold wanted him to be.

 _What I want you to be is yourself_ , Harold thought sadly, and then wished he hadn’t, because John hunched over a little as he ran, and sank down onto the sofa with a hopeless sob.

Should he simply _order_ John to be happy again? To feel good, and to not be in pain? It probably didn’t work like that… and, even if it did, the thought of directly controlling John’s emotions like that was utterly repulsive. And how much worse would it be if he ordered John to be happy, and John got more miserable because he _couldn’t follow that order?_

It was cruel to try to order a sub to do what they were incapable of… and yet there were people who did so, deliberately, and John had been subject to them before. _If I ordered a general to change himself into a sea bird_ , Harold thought, recalling the imagery of a majestic king ruling over a tiny planet, _and he did not carry out the order… which of us would be in the wrong?_

As Harold limped back over to the sofa, John was hugging himself, shivering. Harold had the sudden impulse to cover him up, or to warm up some towels, but it probably wasn’t anything like cold. The part of John that needed to be warmed wasn’t his physical body.

“I don’t know that I have ever expressed to you,” Harold said quietly, sitting down with barely a hand’s breadth between them, “the deep regard I have developed for you, these past few months. Maybe you’ve felt it. You are undoubtedly the finest sub that I have ever encountered, but then, I haven’t really had the chance to connect with a sub before. I don’t doubt that you are also one of the finest men that it has been my privilege to know.”

John took in a shivering breath; Harold couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.

“I’m sorry that you have to go through this,” Harold said softly. “I’m sorry that you’ve had to go through it before. There are… many things in your life that I wish you had never had to go through. But all those horrible things have led you to this place. Not, specifically, this room; I mean, if it were not for the horrible things that you’ve gone through, you wouldn’t have the skills, or the courage, or the willpower to work the numbers. And that is something I do not regret; I hope you don’t regret it either.”

“I don’t regret it,” John said, as if the words had been pulled from him, almost unwillingly.

“I’m not angry with you, John,” Harold continued. “I have been, and continue to be, quite proud of you. For all the people you’ve saved. The dangers you’ve thwarted. You are a force for great good in this city, and there is little more than I could ask of you.”

John’s breathing was getting easier, no longer sounding like sobs.

“It’s true that I want to think about the bond,” Harold said, trying his best to keep his emotions from strangling the logic of the claim. “But I also don’t want to think about it _yet_. I don’t want to think about it until I’m sure that you’re back in your right mind again. Because I want to consider it _with you_ … and, if we do start up a relationship—that _kind_ of relationship—then I want it to be free of this negative beginning. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” John said. “That makes sense.” His voice was low, and a little rough, but much calmer than it had been just moments before.

“Then until the drugs are out of your system, please don’t bring up a bond again. We’ll get to it when I am ready. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” John responded instantly.

They sat in silence for a while, Harold carefully bringing his emotions under control, and John slowly relaxing back into that careful, focused state, waiting on Harold’s orders. Harold tried not to let himself react negatively to the idea; John wasn’t responsible for being in this state, and getting upset about it would only hurt them both.

John seemed to be happiest when obeying clear orders, though, so Harold tried to work out what might be a clear, obvious, and useful command right now. Which was obvious as soon as his gaze settled on the bloodstained trousers.

“Mr. Reese,” Harold said calmly, “would the drugs make it difficult for you to shower on your own?”

“Not at all,” John replied. “It’s a simple command with an obvious goal. They used to use that kind of thing after a session, to use up the remaining time—what was left of the drugs in our system. Sometimes they’d give us the tasks that other recruits found too boring, like digging ditches or moving equipment around. I’d end up happily toting boxes back and forth for six or seven hours at a stretch. That was the good side; there was one time a colonel had it in for me, and he switched my task to jogging up and down a mountain. Even the pain felt great, until it kept me from following the order like I thought I should. Kept trying to obey until my body was physically incapable of continuing, and I ended up lying on the path, whimpering, until someone found me; woke up in the medic, and couldn’t walk normally for three or four days.”

With great effort, Harold tamped down his reaction again. “Mr. Reese,” he said, “I know that you mean to help me understand what I’ve asked about, but these anecdotes about the horrible things done to you are more likely to cause problems than to help, right now. If there’s an anecdote that I truly need to know, then, by all means, tell me when it’s necessary; otherwise, please keep them to yourself.”

“Of course,” John said happily.

“That does settle the issue, though,” Harold said. “You’ve been hard at work, and gotten bloody; a good shower should be quite the improvement. Can you clean yourself off without getting your dressings too wet?”

“I can do that.”

“If any part of this it very difficult to do on your own, you should ask for help. I would be glad to assist you.”

“I will.”

“Is there anything else I should do to phrase this correctly? I mean to say, you’re not going to do something like scrub your skin off because you don’t feel clean enough for me?”

“No, I understand your desire well enough. You want me to be reasonably clean and comfortable, to avoid unnecessary sources of illness, and to not contaminate the things I touch afterwards.”

“Good,” Harold confirmed, and John’s smile widened. “Another question: Can you perceive my thoughts and emotions through the wall? With the door closed?”

“Sometimes,” John said. “Weakly. It depends on the material, and whether there’s a significant gap between the wall and the floor. It’s not line-of-sight, and it’s not based in pheromones or anything—it’ll go right through thin glass—but it’s kinda like a scent or an aura, I guess? It spreads out from the dom and winds around obstacles, but it’s not blocked by the same sort of things you’d expect to block something that was purely physical.”

“What about towels?”

“Maybe? Some cloth blocks it, some doesn’t; thicker cloth is better than thin.”

That was a matter that could use some experimentation. Still, it settled the immediate issue of whether Harold would have to carefully watch his emotions while John wasn’t even in the room.

“All right, then. You may take a shower. There are towels under the sink; please try to block the gap under the door before you start. I’ll be out here, in case you need anything. Please call me, or come get me, if you do.”

John’s face was glowing with happiness again as he retreated to the bathroom, and Harold sank back against the sofa cushions, trying not to relax his mind so much that his emotions would spill out into the bathroom.


	8. Passing Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold and John discuss higher-level goals, and eventually get to enjoy being cooped up together.

The door opened, and Harold turned reflexively to see John come out of the bathroom… completely naked, wet skin glistening. Before Harold had the chance to do more than gape, John gasped out “I’m sorry!” and looked around wildly for a second before retreating into the bathroom again, half-closing the door and hiding behind it but peeking around to keep looking at Harold. “I used all the towels to block the door, and you wanted me to be clean, but there’s nothing else in here that’s clean, and—”

“That’s fine!” Harold blurted, closing his eyes. “It’s all right, John. There are clothes in the bedroom I set up for you; I should have thought to bring them out. It’s down the hallway, on the right. Please go get dressed, if you would.”

Footsteps hurried across the room and into the back, and Harold breathed a sigh of relief before breaking into helpless chuckles. This would be another way in which a bond might make it easier for them: Bonded, they wouldn’t have this social distance between them, the separation that made nudity an issue, that roused embarrassment over simple mismatched expectations. He could let John tend to him in a way he wouldn’t accept even from a paid service right now; that kind of intimacy could be open to them.

It was a tantalizing thought, and one he tucked away again before John came back from the bedroom, dressed in comfortable pajamas. At Harold’s approving look, John smiled again and breathed more easily. “I figured you wanted me to be comfortable, and we’re not leaving this place for a while, so—”

“That’s perfectly all right, Mr. Reese,” Harold said, getting to his feet. “I imagine I’ll be joining you in casual wear quite shortly.” Unless… was it a problem for him to indulge in a shower while Reese was still under thrall? “Ah… is it safe to leave you out here by yourself, for a while?”

Reese frowned. “If nothing happens, I’ll just stay where you tell me to stay. That’s safe enough. But if there’s danger, like a fire, or a gunman, I’m not going to react to it in a normal way. Subs under thrall are quite passive unless they’re given specific orders to be active, and if it’s a danger that they weren’t warned to pay attention to, they’ll just ignore it.”

“I see.” Taking a moment, Harold tried to work out the most effective order he could give… the kind that covered the widest range of possibilities, with the least leeway for misinterpretation. It wasn’t as precise as coding, and didn’t have the same ease of troubleshooting, but it was within his capabilities. “All right, I have some directives for you. Primary Directive: I value your life and your freedom, as much as I do my own; do not allow either of us to be captured or killed. Can you understand that, as the highest-level objective?”

“Yes.” John’s attention was as rapt as Harold had ever seen it, almost frightening in its intensity.

“Secondary Directive: I also value our safety. When it does not conflict with the Primary Directive, keep us from being harmed. Explain these directives to me.”

“I am to take whatever action is necessary to keep us from being killed, captured, or harmed. If harm, or the risk of harm, is necessary to preserve life or freedom, then I am to take action to keep us from being captured or killed, even if it means letting us be harmed.”

“Exactly right. It is better to be alive, safe, and free. It is better to be alive and free than to be safe; it is reasonable to be somewhat unsafe in order to preserve life or to preserve freedom. It is generally _not_ reasonable to risk death in order to maintain safety. However, life and freedom are a little more difficult to rank. Life is important enough that we can accept, or risk, short-term captivity in order to preserve life.

“But for you and me, it is vital that we remain free, and that the secrets we carry are not compromised. So avoiding long-term captivity, or captivity with a high chance of compromising our most important secrets, is worth some risk of death; it may be preferable to die in order to avoid or escape captivity. Now, explain to me these directives.”

“I am to take whatever action is necessary to keep us from being killed, captured, or harmed. In order to preserve life or freedom, I can allow harm, or risk harm. In order to preserve life, I can allow or risk short-term captivity, if it is not likely to put our most important secrets at risk; I assume this means the Machine and matters of national security—”

“Yes.”

“And if the captivity, or risk of captivity, is likely to threaten those secrets, or to be long-term, then I am to risk even our lives, or allow us to die, in order to avoid that captivity.”

“Exactly. Very good. Now, there are many kinds of threats in the world, and it is the height of insanity to meet each threat with the same level of response. For example, if I eat too many donuts, I may get unhealthy enough to cause heart problems, but I do not intend for you to protect me from donuts. If I swallow my food wrong, I may choke to death, but I do not intend for you to puree my meals so as to avoid the possibility. Is that clear?”

“You don’t want me to try to protect you from the normal, everyday risks of life, because that is not the kind of threats you mean here.”

Again, John was picking up Harold’s intentions, more than just his words. This just might work. “Excellent, Mr. Reese. Now, the type of threats I want you to protect me from, and to protect yourself from, are the ones that pose an imminent danger, a threat to life or freedom or safety, within the next 24 hours, where the risk is significant rather than unlikely, the danger is serious, and the harm is not trivial. If you become aware of such a threat, to either of us, then I want you to take action to avert it—to preserve life, freedom, and safety—if taking action would do this better than remaining passive would. Is that clear?”

“If there is an imminent threat to life, freedom, or safety, that threatens either of us, I am to take action unless the risk is unlikely, or the harm is trivial, or the danger is not that serious, but only if action is a more effective way of reducing the danger than inaction would be.”

“Perfect. Now, those are the higher-level directives. My other orders are to be weighed against the higher-level directives, unless I specifically tell you to disregard one or more of the higher-level directives. If I do tell you to disregard a higher-level directive, then my other orders should take precedence.”

“Yes.”

“Now, here is a low-level directive: I value your comfort, and do not want you to be uncomfortable without good reason. When it does not conflict with higher-level directives or my other orders, you can and should take action to secure your own comfort, rather than remain in a state of discomfort that can easily be resolved. For example, if you are hungry, you do not need a direct order to seek out food; I want you to not feel hungry without good reason. If you are tired of standing up, go ahead and sit down. And if you need to use the facilities…” Harold frowned; that would be too easily misinterpreted. Best to be clear. “That is, if your discomfort could be solved by using the toilet, go ahead and use the toilet.”

“You want me to be comfortable, and to seek out my own comfort, where it is reasonable and does not conflict with higher-level directives or your other orders.”

“That exactly. Very good. Now, to be sure of the parameters, what would you do if you noticed that the sofa was on fire?”

“I would try to put out the fire,” John replied, “and if it was too big to put out, I would get you and get us both out of the building.”

“Good,” Harold said, relieved, and John glowed at the praise. “What if an enemy gets into this room, and they have a gun?”

“I would hide,” John said, but then he frowned. “But that wouldn’t protect you. I would… I would hide in the same room with you, and block up the door so they couldn’t enter. And if they got in, I would shoot them, if I had a gun, or hit them over the head, if I didn’t.”

“You really don’t prioritize your own well-being, do you?” Harold asked, wincing as his back reminded him that he’d been standing in one place too long. “That isn’t at all the kind of strategy you use in the field.”

“My safety is of far less concern than the safety of the numbers,” John replied. “If I tried to take the safest route, it would be too slow to help them, most of the time. That’s not what you hired me for.”

Well, at least his reasoning was sound—and Harold had indeed brought John on board to protect the numbers, so it was right to value their lives above John’s… for the most part.

“Now…” It was important to check counter-cases, not just the obvious ones. “What if you notice that the bathroom floor is wet, and I could slip and hurt myself?”

“Imminent safety risk, moderate likelihood because you’re careful but falls do happen all the time, chance of damage from fall is high, damage could be fatal but usually isn’t, though the chance of serious damage is high. I should take action, and would wipe it up with a towel.”

“Good. What if you’ve made me soup, and it was just boiling, but I’m about to take a sip?”

“Imminent safety risk, moderate likelihood because you drink hot liquids frequently but it’s not that hard to burn your tongue, chance of damage is high, but a burnt tongue is painful, not serious. I don’t have to take action; it’s not covered under the directives. However, you value your safety, so I should warn you that it is hot, so you would be careful with it.”

“Perfect,” Harold said, and John glowed. “What if… what if I go into the bedroom, but the door gets stuck and I’m trapped in there?”

“Current threat to freedom, and future risk to safety and life. I would need to find a way to free you. I’d dismantle the door, or try to break it down if I needed to. After warning you to get out of the way. If that didn’t work, I’d see if there’s a way to get at the window—”

“That’s a threat to _your_ life, Mr. Reese,” Harold interjected, with a sudden flash of John trying to scrabble his way along the sheer outside wall, hoping to bust through bulletproof windows.

“It’s a long-term captivity, though, if I can’t get you out; nobody would know to come here. So my life is less important than getting you out.”

Harold rubbed at his temple. “You couldn’t get in through the windows,” he asserted. “They’re bulletproof, and it would be impossible for you to get outside to begin with, let alone move along the outside of the building to get to the right window. Not without some hefty gear that we don’t have here, and that I don’t trust you to use right now. If ever.”

“Then I wouldn’t try the windows. But if the door doesn’t break down, I… I’d call in Fusco,” he said, triumphantly. “He could bring the right gear to get through the door.”

The thought of Fusco being invited up to the safe house was not entirely appealing, but Harold had to admit that John had the right sequence of moves in his brain. Leaving Harold stuck in a room was clearly an unacceptable outcome, so certain undesirable outcomes could still be preferable to _that_.

There was only one problem with that part of the plan: “Okay, that is one of the few acceptable reasons to leave this safe house. I don’t want you to leave unless it’s vital to preserve life, freedom, or safety, for one of us. If it’s anything else, I want you to stay in here, no matter what, until the drugs wear off.”

“Yes.”

“But…” Harold sighed, and limped over to the door; John followed him, intuitively understanding what he wanted to do. “It might be important for you to know how to get out, especially if I’ve gone and injured myself. It’s this button, here,” he said, indicating the panel beside the door. “At the moment, it can only be opened from the inside; it would take more than an hour’s work with blowtorches or explosives to get in from the outside. This button disables that security and opens the door automatically, so it’s easy to get out. I don’t want you pressing the quick-escape button unless it’s an emergency—a threat to the higher directives.”

“Got it,” John said.

“Excellent. In that case, I’m going to take a shower. You are to stay in the safe house, but you are free to seek out comfort and pleasure if you like.”

“It’s pleasurable to wait for your commands,” John said, sensibly.

“Well… I’m thinking more in terms of sitting on a comfortable sofa, or looking through the kitchen for food. You could even lie down, if you like; your bedroom is at your disposal. I will be out in a few minutes.” Then he hesitated; his leg really was starting to hurt, and if John was happy from taking orders, why not? “My room is at the end of the hall; please find my pajamas and put them on the living room table. Not touching your trousers,” he added, and watched John happily trot off down the hall.

It took Harold a bit longer than John to wash up, even though he wasn’t carefully washing around bandages. Mostly, he tried to keep his mind blank; it seemed better than thinking too much, right now. When he opened the door, John was right beside it, holding his pajamas; Harold took them, trying again to make sense of the thrall state with regard to unspoken commands. More than likely, John had felt through the door that Harold was ready for his pajamas and that he didn’t want to expose himself, even wearing a towel, and so John had hurried to see to his desires, even though they conflicted with his previous order.

No… they hadn’t, actually. He had told John to put his pajamas on the table, and John certainly had; picking them up again and bringing them to Harold wasn’t contradicting that order. Interesting.

After getting dressed, Harold did his best to wipe up the bathroom floor so that John wouldn’t feel compelled to alleviate the threat, and then he headed into the kitchen. The cupboards were stocked full with canned goods and dried meats in sealed containers. The fridge was empty, but there wasn’t much you could put in a fridge that would last for years at a time; the freezer held plenty of vegetables, packaged to avoid freezer burn.

Harold had always been interested in food; as a kid, he’d marveled at some of the cooking channels, wondered if he’d ever get the chance to taste something like pad thai or eggs benedict or marzipan. As a millionaire on the run, whose time was spent maintaining cover identities and programming world-altering sapient ASIs, he’d judged that his appreciation for cuisine was best kept to paying for the skills of others in preparing it, rather than learning anything more than the basics himself.

So it was a little disappointing to sit down with John to a meal of canned raviolis, canned tuna, frozen carrots, and dried pineapple; it certainly wasn’t the type of soul-nourishing meal that he’d grown used to very quickly after leaving home. Still, it was decent enough, a good way to replenish his energy after a long day; was it really 2 AM already? And John’s open-faced pleasure was a great relief after his earlier breakdown.

It seemed a bit gauche to pull out a Bandol rosé next to canned goods, but the only other options were coffee, tea, and filtered water; this late, he didn’t want the caffeine, and he wanted something a _little_ more refined than tap water.

Their meal was spent in relative silence, Harold contemplating his next move while trying to avoid letting the future trouble him, and John evidently abiding by Harold’s unspoken wish for peace, leaving him alone to his thoughts.

The lack of internet was a low-grade irritation in his brain; he’d kitted out this safe house before he’d figured out how to rig a Faraday shield with internet access, so he didn’t even have a way to check on the building’s cameras. It was like existing in a metal box, beyond which was darkness and any number of threats, unseen until you opened the lid and let them in. At this point, his only goal was to wait out the drugs; once John was operational again, they could head outside, and meet whatever sort of threat had accumulated during the radio silence.

He hoped his precautions had been enough to keep them from being followed, but there wasn’t much he could do about it if they had been. Just wait it out, and see what happened when they opened the door.

“You’re worried,” John said, as they were cleaning up the dishes.

“It’s hard not to be,” Harold replied. “But we’ve done as much as we can, for now, and I’ve gotten to the point where thinking about the future isn’t very helpful.” He could recall some times back at MIT when he’d have finished a test in ten or twenty minutes and be sitting there, considering whether to go back and change the answers, even though he knew with near certainty that he’d gotten them right the first time. There was a point at which further thought was merely second-guessing, and worse than pointless.

“But you’re still thinking about it.”

Sighing, Harold started drying dishes for John to put away. “Well, at this point, I would very much like to get some sleep, turn my brain off for a while… but you’ve said that you can’t sleep until the drugs have worn off, and I wouldn’t feel the least bit comfortable accepting that kind of relief while you’re both forced to stay awake and less capable of responding to threats.”

“I could distract you,” John offered again.

Harold handed him another plate. “What sort of distraction are you offering, precisely?”

“If you need to get your mind off of something, you can either focus it on something else, or use physical pleasure to make your mind stop focusing on anything much at all. So we could share memories, discuss sports, debrief over the cases so far and anything we can learn from them, read books, play chess… or you could write code. We could clean house together, and try to focus on the details of that task. Or I could give you a massage, which could distract your brain through physical pleasure.”

It took a few blinks for Harold to parse the offer, and a few more to remember that dom/sub relationships were fundamentally nonsexual. John was offering to relieve his body of some of the aches and pains, the tension and stiffness that had built up over a long day, possibly even some left over from the days before it. It would, undeniably, be a pleasure, if he could find it within him to relax that much, to trust John not to take advantage of his vulnerability.

However, that was asking far too much—of both of them—for tonight. Harold wasn’t ready to trust anyone that much, not even John, much as he hoped he could get there someday. And John… John was still under thrall; it would be unconscionable to take advantage of his vulnerability in that way, regardless of how much he’d enjoy the act itself or how harmless the act might be.

“I appreciate the offer,” Harold said gently, “but that kind of physical pleasure is beyond the scope of this partnership… for the moment.” But what of the other options? Debriefing seemed likely to call his attention to their plight, rather than distract him from it. Sharing memories hit too close to the secrets he maintained, including his reason for fleeing Wisconsin and the odd and fractured life he’d led once he’d truly been on his own. Writing code was leaving John to himself again, which didn’t seem fair to John. They’d be dumping this safe house as soon as they left, so housework seemed pointless; Harold was either going to hire some trained demolitions experts to tear it down, or get a team to dismantle the safe house itself and then turn the place into a properly functional apartment complex, so the workmanship wouldn’t be wasted.

Reading, while normally an enjoyable pastime, simply wasn’t appealing right now; trying to immerse himself in great literature would be reducing his awareness of John and what John needed from him. Given the hours left to spend in this place, discussing sports was equally uninteresting.

Which left chess. Or, rather, since Harold quite deliberately hadn’t stocked any of his safe houses with chess boards, the broader category of _board and card games_. A couple of decks of regular playing cards, that could certainly give them something to do, but getting his mind off of their predicament would require perhaps a little more engagement. And yet, he couldn’t expect John to pick up on complicated rules or systems thinking while his brain was this compromised. So, no _Pandemic_ … but perhaps _Carcassonne_ could be a good middle ground. Simple enough to explain the basics, complicated enough to have plenty of strategy for Harold to focus on.

They spent a good couple of hours working through multiple runs of the game, building a variety of bizarre-looking castles while John got better at strategy and Harold stopped being able to lap him on the points chart. Somewhere in that, Harold recalled that the drugs didn’t actually reduce John’s awareness or ability to process complex thoughts; it simply subverted his initiative. And since Harold wanted a challenge, and wanted John to learn the game well enough to play it well, John was having no trouble fulfilling either task; his brain was, again, focused directly on what Harold wanted of him.

Forcing John to play board games was… surely nowhere near the weirdest thing that John had been forced to do in his life. But Harold made a mental note to introduce John to some good modern games when he was sober enough to really appreciate them.

As the sun was rising, and Harold’s back was truly starting to protest the lack of horizontal time, they moved on to _Pandemic_ , and John proved just as adept at taking out viruses as he was at taking down gunmen; his ability to stay aware of whole systems of threats turned out to translate particularly well. He even spotted likely outbreak spots before Harold did; it wasn’t long before Harold was pulling out the purple virus expansion and shuffling in mutation cards.

That kept them going, with the weariness of an overlong sleepover in which everyone’s too keyed up to sleep, until mid-morning, at which point they stopped for breakfast. Oatmeal, two years out of date but still palatable, and better with dried blueberries on top; the milk was reconstituted, a flavor Harold tolerated more than cared for.

With the games pretty well played out, Harold took John up on the suggestion of reading, and brought out two copies of the script for _My Fair Lady_ ; Nathan had introduced Harold to the thought of reading play scripts aloud, for fun, but it had been a couple of decades since Harold had last had the time to enjoy it, let alone a person to enjoy it _with_. So he and John sat next to each other on the sofa, trading lines; Harold played Professor Higgins, while John used his girliest voice for Eliza, and the delighted laughs they shared warmed Harold’s heart again.

Then Harold lay down on the sofa, giving his back a much-needed rest, while John read poetry to him: Kipling and Cummings, Frost and Dickinson, Burns and Donne. Silverstein, too, just to keep John from thinking that Harold was too classical to be fun.

It was getting on toward mid-afternoon, and Harold was finding that the position made it too tempting to just close his eyes for a while; he got to his feet and went to check the door while stretching himself out. What else could they do to kill time?

How much longer did they need to, anyway? It was… it had started at 9 PM, and John had said that the peak effect started roughly an hour later, and lasted for eight. So… 10 PM, then… 6 AM? With lingering effects for another, what, ten hours after that? Which means they had only a couple hours left to go.

That couldn’t be right. Unless ‘lingering effects’ wasn’t noticeably different from the peak effect.

“John,” he said, and John turned instantly to face him, rapt attention again. That much was one noticeable change: At the start, John could barely keep his eyes off Harold. But then, maybe he’d changed because it had become clear that the constant watching was freaking Harold out a bit. “Are you… does it feel like… how much are the drugs still affecting you?”

Briefly, John considered. “About the same as normal. I think. Sometimes it’s hard to tell while I’m riding the waves.”

“Is it possible for you to fight back now? Disobey orders?”

The worried horror of John’s expression did not go unnoticed, but all he said was, “I can try. If you want.”

“Actually,” Harold said, “let’s try it a different way. I don’t want you to get hurt if it’s avoidable, but there may be some amount of discomfort in trying to test the hypothesis. I have two orders for you; listen to both orders in full before trying to carry them out.”

John nodded, that same intent awareness centered entirely on Harold.

“First Order: When I order you to ‘begin,’ I want you to immediately get off the sofa and stand by the front door. Second Order: I order you to resist the first order for a full fifteen seconds before complying, but, if you find that you cannot resist the order, I want you to put your hands on top of your head while complying. Do you understand?”

“When you tell me to begin, I must resist the command for fifteen seconds if I can.” John’s face was still full of worry, but he didn’t hesitate. “The full command is to immediately get off the sofa and go stand by the front door; if I cannot resist, I must put my hands on top of my head.”

“Exactly. Now begin.”

Without a second’s delay, John got to his feet and walked over to the door, hands on his head, shudders running through his body.

“It’s all right, John,” Harold said quickly. “You’ve done well. You did what you were supposed to do, and I’m very pleased.” Focusing on pleasure rather than concern was difficult, but he managed it, and John swiftly calmed, his expression going back to that dopey adoration from earlier in the night.

“The dose must have been set up to last longer,” John said calmly. “I’ve never been under peak effect this long.”

“Well… it surely can’t last forever,” Harold said with a sigh. “We’ll just… have to stay here another couple of days. However long it takes.”

“ ** _John Reese!_** ” The sound through the door was muffled, but not nearly as much as it should have been; as Harold turned to face the door he realized, with some horror, that the woman—whoever she was—was using something to amplify the volume. “ ** _I want this door open. Open it for me, now!_** ”

With shocking haste, John pushed past Harold and pressed the quick-escape button on the wall. Harold managed only a gasp of “ _John, no!_ ” before the heavy door was swinging open, revealing a dark-haired woman with a no-nonsense face. Harold stumbled back a step.

“Restrain him,” the woman said, stepping inside and surveying the place.

Before Harold could think to do anything, John was behind him, an iron grip on each of his wrists. Not hard enough to hurt, but a sure indication that Harold wasn’t going to be doing anything with his hands until John released him.

The sinking feeling in Harold’s gut told him that wasn’t going to be soon.


	9. Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shaw commands the room, but she doesn't yet have all the facts.

Confident of her control over the situation, since Reese was clearly under her thrall (and the guy with the glasses and spiky hair clearly wasn’t packing the highest rating in the class), Shaw pushed the door shut until she heard a rather complicated _clunk_ that she took to be it locking tight. No sense letting other threats get at them before she was ready to move.

She glanced around, taking in a spacious safe house with more amenities than any place she’d ever had to hole up for a while. “Tell me, are there any threats in here that I should deal with immediately?”

“Nothing that I know of,” Reese answered instantly, although he looked a little confused. Not the first time she'd seen that look on a sub; they weren't used to being completely unable to read the dom's intentions.

“Anything I’d prefer to know about this place before I go exploring?”

“It’s just a safe house. Faraday shielded. We’ve got supplies to last well over a month.”

“And your plans were…?”

“Stay here until the drug wears off.”

Turning, she regarded the two of them: Reese’s calm, almost euphoric expression, and the other guy’s worried eyebrows and alarmed eyes.

“So who’s this, then?” she asked, walking in closer and regarding him.

“Harold Finch,” Reese said, “only I’m pretty sure that’s not his real name.” The man swallowed, eyes going a little wider. “I know several others that he’s gone by, but I haven’t found any reason to conclude that they’re any more real than _Finch_ is. Most of them use the name _Harold_ , and I’d say there’s a better than eighty percent chance that—”

She waved him to a stop. “Civilian, spy, or what?”

“Civilian. He’s done work for the government, but, other than that, he’s simply a very secretive person with above-average knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes.”

More than likely he was actually a _Harold_ , then; people trying to stay hidden didn’t change their first names unless they were notable, or if they were trained, and this guy didn’t seem trained, not from what she’d seen of him so far. Good instincts, like not opening his mouth too soon, but he seemed more stunned at this turn of events than anyone with training could possibly be.

“Any reason the CIA might want to have a talk with him?”

“Several reasons,” Reese said easily, “and probably a few that I don’t even know about yet. He’s the guy who—”

“If I’m going to have my personal life laid bare like this,” Harold said loudly, even as Reese continued, “I’d at least like to know who’s interrogating me.”

“—invented the computerized surveillance system that feeds the CIA information on terrorists, for one, and he deliberately designed it as a black box that they can’t access, but he’s been using a backdoor into the system to get information on—”

“John, please stop,” Harold murmured, squeezing his eyes shut as if in pain, and collapsing forward a bit like he was suddenly very tired.

“—individuals in danger, so we can—” Reese continued—

“ _Stop_ ,” Shaw blurted, as soon as the shock wore off; eyes wide, she ran through a quick calculation as to just how much it was going to be a problem for her to know this information. Her instincts were screaming _quite a lot_ , because this was the kind of information that the high levels of the government did _not_ want to get out. The kind that even agents like her were not expected to be able to keep safe. The kind you sent switches like John to handle, because anyone less capable of resisting coercion was automatically a liability.

The CIA _killed_ liabilities.

When they got around to interrogating John, they’d find out just how much he’d told Shaw… and, at that point, she’d either be bumped up to higher clearance, or, more likely, bumped off. Black hood and a bullet—and not before enduring her _own_ interrogation, the kind she tried not to think about too much.

But it wasn’t like any of this was news, really. She’d taken out enough agents (rogue and otherwise) that she’d always anticipated getting taken out at some point herself; the thought didn’t even alarm her, not really, but then, not much _did_. It was just… this was a little sooner than she’d expected it to be. Not that she could’ve put a timeline to her expectation, but… not this young. Not before she was even thirty.

But what other options did she have?

Well, one way or the other, delaying the outcome wasn’t going to get her anywhere. The sooner this got handled, the better. Shaw spotted a laptop bag on the table by the sofa, and double-checked that it was actually a laptop before shouldering it. “Anything else here I should take with me?”

“I don’t think so,” Reese said. “We haven’t done much since we got here; the place has probably been empty for months.”

“All right, let’s go.”

“ _Fu inlay knee F rafa_ ,” Harold said, and the panel next to the door blinked as Shaw heard a clunking sound within it—louder, more complicated, and somehow more sinister than the sound from earlier.

“What did you just do?” she asked, staring at the door panel and its dark red display.

“I don’t know what he did,” Reese said.

“I bought us time,” Harold said firmly. “That door won’t open again for seventy-two hours; I triggered a quarantine procedure. The windows are the strongest bulletproof glass I could buy, three and a half inches thick and well cemented in; the walls offer even stronger protection against penetration, and there are no tools in here that are capable of breaking through it with any speed. The Faraday shield prevents any wireless communication in or out, and the windows have an exterior coating that hides the inside of this building even when the lights are on, so you can’t even blink out an S.O.S.

“Now, if you would,” he continued, “I believe I asked for your name.”

Shaw stared at Harold, impressed despite herself. After a moment, she shook it off, trying to form a quick order of events. “Is that panel going to hurt me if I mess with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Reese said, “though I could do it for you, so you don’t risk getting hurt.”

“You stay right there and hold him,” Shaw said, and went to examine the panel. While she wasn’t as adept at hackery as Cole had been, she wasn’t entirely inept… but a quick hunt through possibilities told her that the only likely veto would be something involving unusual interface options. In other words, a secret code only Harold knew, and he obviously wasn’t going to share it with her.

She didn’t feel inclined to bargain with him, and didn’t really have much to offer him even if she tried. Nothing he’d believe, anyway.

Three days in here with these two. Great.

“Well, where’s the food, then?”

 

Five minutes later, she was lounging on the couch with a bowl of chili, irritated by the lack of cheese, tortilla chips, or anything else that might have improved the flavor. Guess Reese was right about nobody being here in a while; the kitchen was stocked exclusively with the kind of stuff that wouldn’t spoil if you left it alone for a couple of years.

“Okay,” she said past a stuffed cheek, “so what am I going to do with you two in the meantime?”

“You could start by telling me your name,” Harold said petulantly.

Shaw snorted; he seemed like the kind of guy who didn’t like people eating on his couch. It wasn’t like she was planning to annoy him into telling her anything—they’d already told her too much, more than she was comfortable knowing—but it made her feel a little better to be able to get his goat like this. Almost made her want to drip chili onto the couch on purpose, but she didn’t want to waste any of the food she could be eating, so she just crammed her mouth a little fuller.

As she stared at Harold, trying her best not to think about it, she found herself imagining him sitting at a computer, coding away for what had to be _years_ , weaving together all the surveillance data that up until that point had been far too numerous for people to efficiently sort through. The amount of data that a group in a single office building could sort through in real-life had a finite limit, and that limit had been surpassed… probably before the turn of the century.

And now it was running through a computer. Because of course it was. Cole might’ve been fascinated by the idea, but the mechanics had never interested Shaw; she didn’t want to know how they got the information, just what she had to do with it.

Suddenly, she felt exhausted.

She pushed the half-finished bowl of chili onto the table and leaned back onto the couch, swallowing the bite in her mouth with difficulty, like it had turned to paste. And then she sighed.

“All right,” she said, not looking at Harold, “what’s the point of locking us in? Delaying the inevitable? You that scared of what’ll happen when I hand you over?”

“The people you work for betrayed John months ago,” Harold said. “And they just tried to capture him by using his own submissive nature against him. So no, I’m not happy about being turned over to their good graces. Those agents embody the kind of corruption that goes unnoticed in this nation—the corruption itself, or the people who make it possibly simply by doing their job. Those who believe in the infallibility of the system to the point where they’ll carry out the most monstrous orders, convinced that they wouldn’t be asked to do such a thing if the people in charge didn’t have a good reason for doing it.”

 _Are you sure we did the right thing?_ Cole’s voice sounded in her mind, as clear as if he were standing in the room. _He just… he sounded so confused_.

Shaw closed her eyes, and let out a breath.

“Agent Shaw,” she said, finally. “So let me ask you this, _Harold_ : If the public at large knew the sum total of what you’ve done with your life, what do you think their reaction would be?”

He didn’t answer right away. Shaw waited. “Most of them would think I’m a villain,” he asserted, finally. Not confident, or angry, like the other people she’d met whose conspiracy theories would lead them to claim that sort of thing, but just… resigned. “The fact of the matter is, Miss Shaw, that people do want to be protected… they just don’t want to know _how_.”

 _I know exactly where they get those damn numbers from, Cole, and so do you. From a dark room somewhere where they hurt people, badly_.

Except… she’d tried so hard to keep the details out of her mind that she’d never stopped to think: Why just a social security number? If the details were being forced out of captured terrorists, then why that information, why _only ever_ that information?

Cole had started to question it. Which was almost certainly why he’d gotten reassigned. If, indeed, he was still in operation somewhere… instead of one of those other fates that she had to keep herself from thinking about.

“Do _you_ think you’re a villain?” she asked, not even sure what else to say.

“I’m certainly not a hero,” Harold said. “But few are. My invention has led to the death of… so many. I’d love to think that they were all guilty, all planning to commit horrible crimes, but I’m not that naive. And I knew what would be the likely outcome well before I handed my invention over to the U.S. government.”

“That why you’re trying to steal from the government right now?”

He drew himself up. “What are you talking about?”

She pointed at Reese, lazily. “He’s property of the U.S. government. And you’re keeping him from his rightful owners.”

“I’m sorry,” Harold said with narrowed eyes, “but I wasn’t aware that they’d repealed the anti-slavery laws.”

“If you’ve spent any time working with the government, you know full well that what goes on behind closed doors is not exactly what the law allows. Or requires.”

“Which would be why the government so casually destroys its own _citizens_.”

“So you’re aware that Reese here survived a kill order.”

“He— _what?_ ”

“Extreme protection of national security. They thought he was dead, and yet it turns out he’s been alive and loose for months. So it’s my task to hunt him down and bring him back so they can figure out if he’s leaked the secret to anyone else. Only thing is,” she said, biting her lip because it felt good to do _something_ physical, “seems like he ran straight into a guy with more big secrets than _he_ ever carried. Because there is no way they would send _me_ after a secret like _this_. And they’re probably gonna kill me when I bring him in.”

Harold was staring at her, appalled; it made her a bit uncomfortable. “You think they’re going to _kill_ you, and you’re… you’re okay with that?”

“Don’t really have a choice,” she said. “It’s finish the mission or go on the run. And I actually do care about this country, you know. Enough to keep the secrets safe, and to bring in traitors like Reese, and to want to use my life doing something that means a little more than just keeping myself alive.”

She glanced back at Harold, who was merely blinking at her, the emotions on his face unreadable. His mouth kept opening, as if to say something, but then shutting again.

“If you’ve got something to say,” she invited dryly.

“I do,” Harold said, but then, a little milder, “but I would very much like to sit down first. I’m afraid that my back injuries make it quite painful to stay in one position for very long.”

“This true, Reese?” she asked, offhandedly.

“He has injuries to his neck and lower back,” Reese supplied. “They’re pretty severe, and I haven’t confirmed it but he does appear to deal with chronic pain. The only position I’ve seen him maintain for more than half an hour without obvious pain is being seated in a custom back-supporting computer chair.”

“All right, then,” Shaw allowed. “I brought zip ties.”

 

A few minutes later, and Harold was tied to a chair, sitting face to face with Shaw; Reese had obediently taken the other side of the couch. Shaw relaxed and studied Harold for a while.

Then she checked her phone, slipped it back inside her pocket, and got to her feet, pulling out her hypomethylin kit. “Do not fight me,” she said in her most commanding tone, as she stepped close to Reese and prepped the needle. He stayed absolutely still, gazing up at her as she injected it into his bicep. Then she repacked the needle and put the kit away.

“I have two more doses,” she said to Harold as she sat down again. “It’s gonna outlast the quarantine. So if you’re just hoping to delay me until he stops following orders—”

“At this point,” Harold said, resignation in his voice, “I’m mostly hoping to convince you that your interests would be better served by aiding us than by turning us in. I realize it’s a long shot, but it’s possible that you’ll see the wisdom of a different path.”

She stared at him for a long moment, wishing she had a sub’s ability to stare into souls. But, of course, that was what Reese was for. “Reese, why is Harold here trying to talk with me?”

“He wants you to join us,” Reese said. “He thinks that you’d be able to do better things to help people, and to help this country, if you worked with us instead of going back to the government.”

“Not just because I’m likely to end up dead after I turn you in?”

“He doesn’t want you to die, but no, even if the CIA took you back, he’s convinced that you would do more harmful things and not so many good things.”

“Okay,” she said, finally, “so what’s your take on this… Harold?”

Harold swallowed, but his gaze didn’t waver. “You’ve implied—asserted—that I don’t care about this country. I do. Deeply. Which is part of the reason that I cannot stand idly by while evil men bring it to its knees and the general public isn’t even aware of the loss. It’s part of why I built the… the _Machine_ , so that if the government had to be overstepping its bounds in the name of defense, it could at least do so with the pinpoint accuracy that it wanted us all to believe it had. I have mixed feelings about the result, but I’m convinced that I could not have done better than I did.”

“So you fancy yourself a patriot. So do a lot of the ones you’re complaining about.”

“You’ve also asserted that Reese is a traitor, which I assure you could not be further from the truth.”

“Okay, that one’s easy to establish. Reese, have you ever consciously taken action that you knew would be harmful to the country?”

“I’ve killed innocent people,” Reese replied. “Scapegoats, because the orders came down to do so.”

“Not exactly what I meant.”

“How would you define ‘harmful to the country,’ then?” Reese asked.

“Selling information that could harm us to other nations, trying to destroy our infrastructure, that sort of thing.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Is there any reason that the CIA would classify you as a traitor?”

“I went AWOL. Didn’t come back to base after they ordered me to kill my dom.”

Harold’s gasp said that this was news to him, as well. Shaw narrowed her eyes, considering. “What was the reason for the kill order?”

“Officially, she was said to be a traitor, but I know that to be false. The real reason seems to have been to protect the secrets on a particular laptop in Ordos, China.”

This time, Harold’s groan said exactly the opposite: He knew about the laptop. What the hell?

By this point, Shaw wanted nothing so much as to stop filling her head with the kind of secrets that had already gotten others killed, but she was already this far down the rabbit hole; it seemed unlikely that it mattered, anymore. “All right, what do you know about this, Harold?”

“The… the last place I tracked my laptop to was Ordos. And the time frame fits. It’s highly unlikely that another laptop with a secret that world-shaking showed up in the same place at the same time. I’m sorry, John. I had no idea that my work was even involved.”

Shaw groaned. “This a secret about the surveillance thing, or a different world-shaking secret?”

“It had some amount of code from the Machine. Enough to show that it existed, and that the Americans had it. I… I hadn’t meant for it to get outside the U.S. quite so soon, but my associate at the time blindsided me and sold it to the Chinese—”

“Fuck,” Shaw said, partly at the revelation and partly at her growing headache. “Was the sale in New York?”

“Central Park.”

“Fuck. Like two years ago, February?”

Harold stared at her, eyes going wide, which was enough of an answer.

“So I get bad intel, and one of them gets away with the laptop I was sent to retrieve, and all of that leads to _this?_ ” She scooped up a spoonful of chili, and let it drip back into the bowl. “Son of a bitch. And _you_ ,” she said, leveling a finger at Harold, “you’re trying to tell me that you love the country, that you aren’t a traitor? Explain leaking top-secret code to the Chinese.”

“I wasn’t the one who leaked it,” Harold protested. “I got alerted to the plight of the man who did, a man that the CIA was trying to _kill_ simply for knowing about the Machine. They didn’t even realize that he’d copied the code.”

“Sounds like they’re right about wanting to eliminate liabilities,” Shaw said. “They knew he was a threat, even if they didn’t know how.”

“You can’t honestly believe that it’s okay to kill people on the possibility that they _might_ be a threat,” Harold protested.

Shaw thought of Cole, and lowered her gaze.

Three days of this conversation was going to kill her.

“Reese,” she said, roughly, “is Harold telling the truth?”

“About which part?”

“Did he betray this country? Deliberately leak code to the Chinese?”

“He didn’t—”

“I was planning to,” Harold cut in, casting a glance at Reese; she held up a hand to stop Reese and let Harold hang himself. “Not to betray the country, or the Machine, but because I knew that people would eventually find out about the Machine, and that they’d eventually try to crack it open. I wanted to make sure that the code they used to do that would make my creation stronger… better able to resist attacks.”

“This true?”

“He’s telling the truth,” Reese replied.

Trying to work her way through the layers of Harold’s plan was giving her a headache. “So is he a traitor?”

“No. He’s been trying since 9/11 to protect this country, and though he’s bitter about the government and doesn’t trust them, he’s trying to help and protect people here, not harm them.”

“Reese, what do you think of Harold?”

“He’s the best man I’ve ever known,” Reese said without the slightest hesitation, “with the strongest moral compass. Brave enough to put himself in danger to protect the innocent, and doesn’t let pain or fear stop him, even though he’s the least warlike dom I’ve ever met, and hates violence. Compassionate and loyal to the point of irrationality. He’s intelligent, clever, always learning, and he carries the same kind of guilt that I carry, the guilt of having done enough evil in your life that you can never make up for it, but you want to try. I would be honored to serve him to the end of my life, and to give my life for him.”

She tried to judge the words objectively, to remember that Reese was still, himself, suspect, and therefore that his judgment was suspect as well. But Reese was under the thrall of hypomethylin, incapable of lying to her or deceiving her in any deliberate way. All of that was what he honestly thought about Harold, and, judging from Harold’s expression, Harold hadn’t expected that much praise out of nowhere.

“All right,” Shaw said, picking up the chili again and kicking her feet up onto the table. “You’ve got three days to convince me. Tell me there’s a better path than handing you guys over to the CIA.”


	10. Agreement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Can Harold convince Shaw that it's in her best interest to join the team?

Three days to convince a patriot who was prepared to die for her country that it was better to join them instead. And if he failed, she knew more than enough to bring down the entire operation.

All the cards on the table, then.

“To begin with,” Harold said, “if you’re convinced that bringing us in is likely to result in your death, I can’t see how that’s an optimal outcome for you. So there are only two eventualities where it might make sense to die that way: First, if avoiding death meant certain harm to this nation, or, secondly, if you were convinced that you could do no greater good with your life than you could by dying to turn us in. So, as I see it, I must convince you that the country will not suffer greater harm by our freedom, and that escaping from your current employers is plausible and would offer you a chance to do good in the world.”

“Tall order,” Shaw shot back. “You so convinced that your secrets can’t harm America?”

“I’m well aware that the exposure of these secrets would be detrimental to the world, Miss Shaw. There’s a reason that only seven people knew about the Machine while I worked on it; the information it provides is vital to protecting our nation, and if the public got wind of it… there’d be such an outcry. It wouldn’t matter that it’s foiled dozens of terrorist plots, saved thousands of lives in just the short time it’s been operational; they’d focus more on the invasion of privacy, and they’d shut it off.

“I’ve only shared the details of its existence with Mr. Reese, and I wouldn’t have shared that information with you if there had been an option to avoid that. But it seems that wasn’t in the cards for tonight. You must understand, Miss Shaw, that the government never knew of my involvement in the project, and that was quite deliberate. I designed the Machine to be a black box—to provide information on terrorist plots and similar fare, without allowing the people in charge to specifically target whichever people or organizations happened to irritate them at the time.”

“So it spits out intel on the plots it sees, but can’t be aimed.”

“Precisely. But there are people in the government, in the CIA and ISA and other clandestine forces, who would stop at nothing to get their hands on the capabilities that I specifically disabled. Telling the Machine who to target, what information to hunt down. And if they got their hands on me—if they knew that I was the one who designed it, the one capable of altering its code—”

“They’d do horrible things to you until you gave them exactly what they wanted,” Shaw concluded. She didn’t look as horrified at the idea as he might have expected, but then, he was starting to get the idea that she had just as good of a poker face as he did.

“Indeed. Rather obviously, I shouldn’t like to be tortured, but I’m even more concerned with what the government would start doing once they had a weapon of such power in their hands. There’s no limit to the evil they could perpetrate, the lives they could destroy. It’s safe to say that the world would be in a far different state once that kind of power has been unleashed.” He took a deep breath. “My greatest worry for my creation is that it will inevitably get used to harm people, and to get a stranglehold on the nation… perhaps on the entire world. So I have done everything in my power to avoid that scenario, to push it back for as long as I can.

“And, quite frankly, Miss Shaw, if that door opens and you’re still convinced that bringing Mr. Reese in would be anything less than a monumental mistake… well, a few hours ago, I was discussing the reasons to prefer death to capture, and I would certainly prefer that in this case. I would rather you kill me and Mr. Reese than turn him over to his captors again, and if you’re still determined to turn him over, then I would rather you kill me than provide the government with the tools they need to take over the world.”

He gave Shaw some time to digest that, as she dug into her chili. Halfway through the bowl, she nodded thoughtfully. “So you’ve got your own scenarios where death is the preferable outcome. You wouldn’t choose life at any cost.”

“Not when my life would be inescapable torture that led to the enslavement of the world, no.”

“But you seem to think there’s an option other than bringing Reese in, or going on the run. Thing is, my employers are very, very good at finding people.”

“I’m well aware. More than likely, the only way to grant you some level of freedom would be to convince your employers that you are dead. That’s within my power; I’ve done it before. Of course, it would take a few days to arrange such an exit strategy.”

Shaw stared at him, unblinking, for long enough to make him uncomfortable. Harold held her gaze, letting himself fall into acceptance mode: This was happening, and the discomfort was meaningless.

After a moment, she sighed and looked away. “So turning you over’s a bad move, and Reese knows enough about you that turning him over might be equally as bad, if you’re still alive. And you _might possibly_ be able to fake my death enough to get the hounds from sniffing me out. Not saying I buy all of this, but what do you think I should be doing after I’m free? Because I’m not the type to run off and hide in the mountains somewhere.”

“It would be quite a shame if you did; I hate to see talent go to waste.”

Over the next twenty minutes, Harold laid out for Shaw the details of the Machine, the numbers, the good they’d done since John came on board. The problems they’d averted. Without mentioning Nathan directly—a wound that was still too raw—he brought out the reasoning by which he’d ignored the call of the numbers, and then why he’d changed his mind. The year of futility, before he’d pulled John into the cases. His expectation that Shaw’s help could improve their efforts even more.

Now and then, Shaw double-checked Harold’s sincerity by asking John, who cheerfully offered up his awareness of Harold’s emotional state and intentions. That factor had put Harold into the unfamiliar—and deeply uncomfortable—mode of trying to share without holding back. He’d beaten a lie detector before, one time, but there was no such hiding from John.

Finally—the chili bowl on the table, emptied of a second helping; Harold still zip-tied to a chair, and John still parked on the sofa next to their captor—the atmosphere in the room seem to have shifted. Shaw’s expression wasn’t any different, but there was an odd tension to her body. Harold wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“Tell me one thing, Harold,” Shaw said, studying him with narrowed eyes. “Am I mistaken in thinking that you’d be able to hack into the CIA’s databases and track down a person for me?”

Harold blinked, then raised his chin. “I’m confident that I could hunt down the data that exists, although that may not be enough to find this person.”

“Reese?”

“He’s telling the truth.”

Shaw hesitated. Then she took a deep breath. “I used to have a partner,” she said. “His name was—is—Michael Cole. He started asking questions, and the next thing I knew he got reassigned; I haven’t heard from him since. If you can find him for me—or figure out what happened to him—then I’d be willing to join your crusade, on one condition.”

“What would that be?”

“If Cole is dead, you find me the person who killed him. Not the one who pulled the trigger—the one who issued the kill order. You find me that person, and you stay out of my way while I take him down.”

“That would almost certainly be a suicide mission, Miss Shaw. And, even if you survived, it would reveal your continued existence to the very people we tried to hide you from.”

“You agree to this, or I walk. And I’m still on the fence about turning you guys in.”

Harold took a deep breath. “If those are your terms, then I can see no better course of action. I will do my best to find Cole for you, and, if he has been executed, I will assist you in locating the person who ordered him killed.”

“Reese?”

“He’s not happy about it, but he’s being honest. He really doesn’t want to sacrifice someone like this, even if they’re a bad guy.”

“Tough.” She sighed, the tension leaving her body again. “All right, so… do you actually have a way to cancel than quarantine?”

“You _do_ understand the purpose of a quarantine, don’t you?”

“So we’re honestly stuck here for three days?”

“I can’t do anything for the first twenty-four hours; if we die, we die. After that, I can activate a code that’ll open the door after another hour and a half. It’s mostly in case the quarantine proves to be a false alarm.”

“So we’re stuck here for… twenty-five and a half hours.”

Harold shrugged. “It’s an improvement.”

“Reese, is Harold lying about the quarantine?”

“No.”

“Is he trying to delay us until you’re out of thrall?”

“No.”

“I have been up for two days straight,” she said. “I’m going to take a nap. Now, the safe thing would be to leave you tied up while I do that.” She paused, while Harold resigned himself to a few more hours of back pain. “If I set you free, are you going to do anything that I’d prefer you not do?”

It was unexpected enough that it took Harold a moment to collect his thoughts. “I’m not going to try to harm you, or capture you more than you’re already captured. And I was honest about the deal we’ve just made. I really do intend to help you, Miss Shaw, and I value your continued existence even more than I value the help you might provide.”

After confirming Harold’s sincerity with John, Shaw cut the zip-ties. “Don’t make me regret being nice. And Reese? Don’t let Harold escape, don’t let him into the room I’m sleeping in, and wake me up if there are any dangers I should know about.”

“I’ll do that,” Reese confirmed.

Harold rubbed his wrists. He resisted asking Shaw about the conflict in orders; if John were able to wiggle free somehow, he didn’t want to call her attention to it.

After checking the back rooms, Shaw claimed Reese’s bed and seemed to fall asleep instantly.

 

Sitting on the sofa, not daring to do anything more just yet, Harold listened to Shaw’s snores for a good twenty minutes before he finally opened his mouth. “Mr. Reese… can we talk?”

“Yes.” John’s attention was on him again, as rapt as ever—as if there had never been another dom to interrupt it. That was an illusion, of course; Shaw’s orders still bound him, even if she wasn’t in the room.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m not upset with you,” Harold said clearly. “But I would like to know, why did you not follow the Primary Directive I gave you? Why did you capture me when Miss Shaw ordered you to?”

“She’s a much stronger dom,” John said. “Her orders take precedence. That’s also why I told her our secrets, when she asked.”

“You told her more than she asked for,” Harold countered. “Was that just following her unspoken desires?”

“I was trying to make her happy,” John replied. “To give her what I thought she might want, from her questions. I can’t see inside her. It’s weird; I’ve never met a dom I couldn’t sense. She’s closed off to me, so I had to work from only what she said.”

“So you can’t tell me if she was sincere about her half of the deal?”

John shook his head. “She’s like a blank wall.”

A dom who couldn’t be sensed by a well trained switch? That was quite the aberration. Harold felt a bit envious of her ability, especially given the way he’d hurt John earlier with his unthinking reactions. Was it a trained skill, or a talent? Was it something he could learn?

Questions for later. For now, it was time to start planning out a lethal accident… one that would fool even the CIA.

 

Three and a half hours later, Shaw emerged from her room to go to the bathroom, and then went back in and fell asleep again, barely paying the two of them a glance. Harold kept working.

Three hours after that, Shaw was up for good. After she brought another bowl of chili to the sofa, Harold showed her his progress on the plan, and she seemed reasonably impressed with it.

Once the food was gone, Shaw was also pretty restless. Then she noticed, as if for the first time, the blood-covered trousers that were still on the table, right next to where she’d set her feet a few hours before.

“You aren’t still bleeding, are you?” she asked John. Minutes later, she was going through the medical kit, pulling out surgical supplies and showing off what was evidently a skilled background in medical care. She raised an eyebrow at Harold’s clumsy attempts at first aid, carefully got the bandages off, and sewed John up with deft fingers (thankfully making use of the lidocaine), then cleaned and bandaged both sites and disposed of the evidence.

Ten minutes later, she was asking John what sort of things they could do to pass the time, and John suggested board games.

Avoiding the competitive games, Harold went straight for _Pandemic_. Shaw turned out to be just as intuitive at the unfamiliar system as John had been; she was also far less willing to employ teamwork, and far more open to sacrifice and risk than either of the other two were. But Harold got a fair view of her as a person, now that they weren’t at such a standoff… and he saw a lot of potential.

 

The peak of John’s thrall wore off well before the locks released, though he was still quite suggestible, and a little confused, for several hours thereafter; Shaw didn’t renew the dose. John didn’t seem to take Shaw’s presence as a threat or even an insult; Harold wondered if perhaps his reaction would be different if she had hurt him, instead of just restrained him, or if she hadn’t been quite so reasonable about their deal.

They shared a meal that wasn’t merely bowls of chili, although Shaw shoveled it into her face just as readily and with little attention paid to the details. She also chided him for not having hot sauce, pointing out that an unopened bottle will last for three years and it’s a useful thing to have in case of a long-term emergency with predictably bland food.

Harold felt a little insulted to have his disaster preparedness critiqued by a stranger, but he had to admit that she had a point, and made a mental note to kit out his safe houses with a few varieties.

 

Eventually, the time had passed; Harold keyed in the code (under Shaw’s eagle eyes), and then they had to wait out another hour and a half, which Shaw did with another nap (and another command to John, not to let Harold escape). She was up five minutes before the door opened, and was gone as soon as it had, not even waiting to get contact info.

Harold got the impression that she’d be able to track them down regardless. But would their next meeting be them faking her death… or Shaw bringing them down?

For the next few days, Harold was on tenterhooks, though he managed to hold himself together enough to tackle the cases that came their way. John didn’t seem meaningfully affected by his time under thrall; of greater concern was his limp, though Shaw had assured them that the wound would heal with very little long-term damage. (“It’s a bullet wound; you don’t get to just shrug off a bullet wound. But it’s in a good spot, and you treated it right.”) Harold tried to keep John from jumping back into work full-force, but John wasn’t having it, and Harold could only hope that he didn’t damage himself further before he could properly heal.

When Shaw reappeared, Harold’s plan had been worked out to the best of his abilities. A day later, they were faking her death, and the team had expanded to three, though Shaw insisted on not telling him where she lived, and had her own criteria for when to show up for work.

Which left only one loose end…

* * *

With the long day drawing to a close, Harold found himself in the library with John, wrapping up their latest case and feeling worn out in more ways than one. It was a poor time to be raising the subject, but then, if he waited until the time was perfect, it was more than likely that they wouldn’t get around to it for months. And John’s logic had been indisputable: A bond would be of benefit to both of them, not just in overall comfort but in terms of safety, and freedom, and possibly even life itself. There might come a time when John’s ability to resist an order was all that lay between them and certain death, and it would be foolish to ignore that possibility.

After closing down his programs for the night, while John took down the photos from the board, Harold finally steeled himself and turned to John.

His partner. Quite unexpectedly, his friend as well. And possibly, in future, something even deeper and clearer, something more intimate and primal than either of those relationships.

“John,” he said, and John turned to him with a question in his eyes.


End file.
